“The Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 and located in Frankfurt, Germany; it brought back concern with ideology, human intentionality and reflexivity into Marxist theory and into sociology. It was Marxist, Freudian, Weberian and neo-Hegelian all at once. In World War I, the working class of each country joined the capitalist class to fight other capitalists and workers in other countries. The founders of the Frankfurt Schule [sic; Frankfurter Schule, Frankfurt school] thought that ideology was part of the answer and began work on the social sources of fascism and authoritarian personality. They found it in the patriarchal family; in the racism, sexism and fascism of art, cinema, magazines and other mass culture. Then too, orthodox social science tended to adopt the model of objective ‘laws’ which seemed to be beyond human reach. Radical sociology had been depoliticized by adopting a positivist style after American, French, and British Philosophy of Science. Led by [Max] Horkheimer, [Theodor] Adorno, [Herbert] Marcuse, [Erich] Fromm, [Walter] Benjamin and others, the Marxian interest in alienated consciousness and the creative role of humans in constructing social forms is reasserted. Critical theorists, especially Marcuse, made a criticism of the obstacles to human praxis in both capitalist and ‘socialist’ societies.

“Also known as the School of Critical Theory or critical sociology, it recognizes that structural Marxism leaves many questions unanswered. Critical theory seeks to remedy this by incorporating theory from freudianism, phenomenology, and existentialism and lately, from feminist and from postmodern scholarship.”

[T. R. Young. The Red Feather Dictionary of Critical Social Science. May 20th, 2000. Retrieved on August 9th, 2009.]

“critical theory, any social theory that is at the same time explanatory, normative, practical, and self-reflexive. The term was first developed by [Max] Horkheimer as a self-description of the Frankfurt School and its revision of Marxism. It now has a wider significance to include any critical, theoretical approach, including feminism and liberation philosophy. When they make claims to be scientific, such approaches attempt to give rigorous explanations of the causes of oppression, such as ideological beliefs or economic dependence; these explanations must in turn be verified by empirical evidence and employ the best available social and economic theories. Such explanations are also normative and critical, since they imply negative evaluations of current social practices. The explanations are also practical, in that they provide a better self-understanding for agents who may want to improve the social conditions that the theory negatively evaluates. Such change generally aims at “emancipation,” and theoretical insight empowers agents to remove limits to human freedom and the causes of human suffering. Finally, these theories must also be self-reflexive: they must account for their own conditions of possibility and for their potentially transformative effects. These requirements contradict the standard account of scientific theories and explanations, particularly positivism and its separation of fact and value. For this reason, the methodological writings of critical theorists often attack positivism and empiricism and attempt to construct alternative epistemologies. Critical theorists also reject relativism, since the cultural relativity of norms would undermine the basis of critical evaluation of social practices and emancipatory change.

“The difference between critical and non-critical theories can be illustrated by contrasting the Marxian and Mannheimian theories of ideology. Whereas [Karl] Mannheim’s theory merely describes relations between ideas of social conditions, [Karl] Marx’s theory tries to show how certain social practices require false beliefs about them by their participants. Marx’s theory not only explains why this is so, it also negatively evaluates those practices; it is practical in that by disillusioning participants, it makes them capable of transformative action. It is also self-reflexive, since it shows why some practices require illusions and others do not, and also why social crises and conflicts will lead agents to change their circumstances. It is scientific, in that it appeals to historical evidence and can be revised in light of better theories of social action, language, and rationality. Marx also claimed that his theory was superior for its special “dialectical method,” but this is now disputed by most critical theorists, who incorporate many different theories and methods. This broader definition of critical theory, however, leaves a gap between theory and practice and places an extra burden on critics to justify their critical theories without appeal to such notions as inevitable historical progress. This problem has made critical theories more philosophical and concerned with questions of justification.”

[James Bohman, “Critical Theory.” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Second edition. Robert Audi, editor. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Page 195.]

“The Frankfurt School has become one of the mostly widely adopted forms of neo-Marxism. It grew out of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. It is sometimes referred to as critical theory, meaning a special kind of social philosophy. It gathered together people who were severe critics of capitalism but believed that Marxism had become too close to communism. They believed Karl Marx’s followers were supporting only a narrow selection of his ideas.

“Neo-Marxists view class divisions under capitalism as more important than gender/sex divisions or issues of race and ethnicity. Neo-Marxism encompasses a group of beliefs that have in common rejection of economic or class determinism and a belief in at least the semiautonomy of the social sphere. They also claim that most social science, history, and literary analysis works from within capitalist categories and say neo-Marxism is based on the total political-economic-cultural system.

“During the Nazi regime, the members of the school fled first to Geneva, Switzerland, then to the United States. They became attached to the department of sociology at Columbia University in 1935. In 1941, they relocated to California. In 1949, some of them—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Friedrich Pollock—returned to Germany and 2 years later reestablished the Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer served as director and believed in a holistic approach, combining theory and practice.

“The neo-Marxists, after seeing the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I, chose the parts of Marx’s thought that might clarify social conditions that were not present when Marx was alive. They filled in what they perceived to be omissions in Marxism with ideas from other schools of thought.”

[Pat McCarthy, “Neo-Marxism.” H. James Birx, editor. Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Volume 4. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2006. Page 1546.]

“… the Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics rejected realism altogether. The Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt practised what it called ‘Critical Theory,’ which was a wide-ranging form of social analysis grounded in Hegelian Marxism and including Freudian elements. The leading figures in philosophy and aesthetics were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Exiled in 1933, the Institute was relocated in New York, but finally returned to Frankfurt in 1950 under Adorno and Horkheimer. They regarded the social system, in Hegelian fashion, as a totality in which all the aspects reflected the same essence. Their analysis of modern culture was influenced by the experience of fascism which had achieved hegemonic dominance at every level of social existence in Germany. In America they saw a similar ‘one-dimensional’ quality in the mass culture and the permeation of every aspect of life by commercialism.” [Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Fifth edition. Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited. 2005. Page 91.]

“The denomination ‘Frankfurt School’ was not chosen by the members, but has been applied to them by others. Members of the group prefer their work to take its name from what they regard as their theoretical programme: ‘critical theory’. An examination of what they, and particularly [Max] Horkheimer, who coined the phrase, have meant by critical theory therefore serves as a convenient introduction to their work as a whole.” [Göran Therborn, “The Frankfurt School.” New Left Review. Series I, number 63, September–October 1970. Pages 65-96.]

“Central to what is ordinarily meant by ‘Western Marxism’ is the work of the Frankfurt school, which took its name from the Institute of Social Research founded in Frankfurt in 1923. Originally concentrating on a more orthodox form of Marxism, the Institute changed its orientation with the appointment of Max Horkheimer as director in 1930. Hewas soon joined by Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse whose work, together with the later contributions of [Jürgen] Habermas, formed the core of the Frankfurt school. Driven into exile in the United States by Nazism, the Institute was re-established in Germany in the early 1950s. The writings of the Frankfurt school thus have as their background, and are a reflection upon, the events which had so forcefully shaped the lives of its members: the collapse of working-class movements in Western Europe and the rise of fascism, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution as the grip of Stalinism stifled intellectual debate, and the lengthy capitalist boom in post-war Europe. They considered that the traditional Marxist approach of historical materialism needed to be supplemented by the work of thinkers outside the Marxist tradition such as [Max] Weber or [Sigmund] Freud.” [David McLellan, “Western Marxism.” The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Terence Ball, editor. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pages 282-298.]

In critical realism, oppression is an aspect of demireality (disunity in difference). On the other hand, oppressive ideologies, such as racism and sexism, are interpretive or epistemic. They refer to human knowledge about demireality. Attacking or refuting the ideologies, as in many varieties of critical theory, will likely do little to eliminate the demireality.

“… I was well known to be a Marxist and to identify with the revolutionary left.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 47.]

“… I wrote dictionary entries …, giving accounts of Marx’s method showing how he approximated to critical realism, and I think that kind of reconstruction of Marx’s method, namely as a critical realist, was probably the best that there was to date.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 117.]

“Dialectical critical realism provides the most abstract concepts for understanding being and therefore the most abstract concepts for a critique of developments within Marxism. It provides a critique of anti-Marxism, and I think on the whole my intention, certainly at the time of writing Dialectic [Bhaskar’s book, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom], was to support the science of history Marx had opened up.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 134.]

“My main concern was not so much to be hermeneutically accurate to Marx as to clear the ground for the unfinished business of Marxism: historical materialism and the critique of political economy. I proceeded from the point of view that Marx had started something, but that Marxists have not well understood what he started; Marx had set an agenda, raising many important questions and it is the job of Marxists, as successors of Marx, to work on and develop this agenda.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 140.]

“I was very grateful to [Margaret Archer] …. I had done the work on the negative generalisation but I think she showed me in very stark terms that there was no way that my position was the same as that of Tony Giddens.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 80.]

“For critical realism, philosophy does not speak about a world apart from the world of science and everyday life. Rather, it speaks about the most abstract features of just such a world. These abstract features are expressed by philosophical categories such as causality, substance, etc. For critical realism, such categories are real.” [Roy Bhaskar, “Prolegonenon: The consequences of the revindication of philosophical ontology for philosophy and social theory.” Engaging with the World: Agency, institutions, historical formations. Margaret S. Archer and Andrea Maccarini, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Page 12.]

“… [Perry Anderson] famously linked the philosophical attitude of ‘Western’ Marxism to its separation from practice while, writing from a broadly Trotskyist standpoint, he saw the superiority of ‘classical’ Marxism as guaranteed by its unity with the struggles of classical Marxism from critical scrutiny …. The problem that Anderson begins to formulate is this; if we reject the various errors of Western Marxism – such things as [Georg] Lukács’s views on reification and class consciousness, or [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s constitution of the totality through scarcity and praxis, or [Jürgen] Habermas’s Kantian separation of system and lifeworld, or [Louis] Althusser’s scientism – if we reject these views; what have we left to fall back on? Does the ‘classical’ Marxism of the post-war period have the necessary degree of scientificity and explanatory power, or is it also infested with schematic posturing? The problem seems to be that since the beginning of the last century, all the alternatives to Stalinism and reformism have been categorised as either ‘Western’ Marxist or ‘classical’ Marxist. Perhaps the answer to this Andersonian problem is to take up critical realism and, through its underlabouring [getting rid of the trash, rubbish, or weeds], rid ourselves of the unnecessaries so that we can get back to being just plain Marxists.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Five Ways in which Critical Realism Can Help Marxism.” Critical Realism and Marxism. Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood, and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 40-41.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s own view of the relationship between CR [critical realism] and Marxism is that ‘Marx’s work at its best illustrates critical realism; and critical realism is the absent methodological fulcrum of Marx’s work’ …, and he [Bhaskar] has remained a committed but non-dogmatic and increasingly controversial Marxist ….” [Peter Nielsen in Mervyn Hartwig. Dictionary of Critical Realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 286.]

“In the early 1970s, [Roy] Bhaskar started as a Marxist existentialist, with a strong Althusserian flavour. For the early Bhaskar, life is ultimately meaningless.” [Heikki Patomäki, “How do Tell Better Cosmic Stories: A Rejoinder to Nick Hostettler.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 1, April 2010. Pages 104-111.]

“For those critical realists who regard critical realism as a form of neo-Marxism, the task of social science is not just that of explaining how structures and agents interact but also that of criticism …. Their argument runs thus. Any scientific account of how the capitalist structure works will show how it is oppressive and exploitative. It will also show how this structure needs to generate ideological beliefs to mask its nefarious character.” [Justin Cruickshank, “The positive and the negative: Assessing critical realism and social constructionism as post-positivist approaches to empirical research in the social sciences.” Working paper 42. August, 2011. International Migration Institute, University of Oxford. Oxford, England. Pages 1-20.]

“Critical realism offers an ontology that can conceptualize reality, support theorizing, and guide empirical work in the natural and human sciences. It views reality as complex and recognizes the role of both agency and structural factors in influencing human behavior.” [Alexander M. Clark, “Critical Realism.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Lisa M. Given, general editor. Thousand Oaks, California: A SAGE Reference Publication imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. 2008. Page 167.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar continued to work metacritically within the conatus to freedom linking [René] Descartes, [Immanuel] Kant, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel and [Karl] Marx … and—uniquely among major contemporary philosophers—remained committed to a (libertarian) form of revolutionary socialism.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “Introduction” to Roy Bhaskar. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page xviii.]

“In light of this [rethinking grand projects], Herbert Marcuse’s very early essay, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’ (1969, originally published in 1928) presents an interesting theoretical promise, one that was only partially fulfilled in his later work. In this essay, Marcuse combines the ideals of Marxist materialism and liberatory theory with the phenomenological analysis of everyday existence provided in Martin Heidegger’s just published Being and Time (1927)….

“Because each account, phenomenology and materialism, deals with only one aspect of human history, each faces limits. Analyses of historicity do not simply enumerate various things that people in fact believe and do, but instead present the structure in which any particular thing that someone believes or does is found.…

“The contemporary relevance of materialist phenomenology, then, consists in its ability to show how the perpetuation of our everyday existence— the unity of historicity and historicality— is both the condition of continuing domination and the possibility of its transformation. For inhabitation does not describe the lost organic past, but the historical social life of true human existence contained in the moment that heritage is redeployed in present activity— contained but perpetually lost through an absorption into the everyday and through the development of a historical mode of existence that militates against its own discovery as historical, either through reification or through the distractions of consumer society.”

[William S. Wilkerson, “Inhabiting Hope: Contributions to a New Materialist Phenomenology.” New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation. William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey Paris, editors. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001. Pages 65-82.]

“All aesthetic showing originates in a self-showing that does not always include an intentional act of showing. All aesthetic illusion [Schein] originates in an appearing [Erscheinen] that is itself not illusory [scheinhaft]. For that reason, I believe, the indisputable insights of both an ‘aesthetics of being’ and an ‘aesthetics of appearance’ can be formulated plausibly only on the basis of an aesthetics of appearing.…

“… aesthetic perception differs decisively from all theoretical and practical appropriation: it allows us to develop a sense of the passing presence of life.”

[Martin Seel, “The aesthetics of appearing.” John Farrell, translator. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 118, March/April 2003. Pages 18-24.]

“The … most fundamental formulation of a Critical Theory of Peace Practice would put at its centre the formal pragmatics of language, raising validity claims through the employment of different discourses and the process of argumentation … in an approximated ideal speech environment. As humans, we all possess the capacity for intersubjective communication to reach understanding, form a consensus, learn appropriate behaviours, attain success, and ground our world views generally. Since the philosophical foundation of a Critical Theory of Peace Practice includes a communicative rationality concept and its consequent methodology, the outcomes resulting from facilitation efforts may differ from the problem-solving format. This is the difference between facilitated conflict resolution and a Habermasian-informed methodology of communicative rationality. Rather than engaging in facilitated analysis of needs, participants to a facilitation process employ discourses to contest the validity of uttered statements in order to find a way of moving beyond the protracted situation.… By including a methodology of communicative rationality, this proposed framework can finally overcome the bounded restrictions imposed by a commitment to needs theory.” [J. Lauren Snyder. A Critical Theory of Peace Practice: Discourse Ethics and Facilitated Conflict Resolution. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The London School of Economics and Political Science. London, England. 2000. Page 205.]

“The real problem with the colonization thesis is that it is incomplete. [Jürgen] Habermas offers a functionalist explanation of reification, but his normative criticism of reification remains largely implicit. In particular, Habermas never explains what is wrong with reification from the perspective of the people whose social relations are reified. The problem with this focus on functionalist explanation is that it is essentially incomplete.…

“… reification is the result of the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ by the systemic imperatives of the economic and administrative subsystems of society.”

[Timo Jütten, “The Colonization Thesis: Habermas on Reification.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Volume 19, number 5, December 2011. Pages 701-727.]

“… it is exchange, that consummates the abstraction that underlies abstract labor (independent of whether the people engaged in exchange are aware of this abstraction). But then abstract labor cannot be measured in terms of hours of labor: every hour of labor measured by a clock is an hour of a particular concrete act of labor, expended by a particular individual, regardless of whether the product is exchanged. Abstract labor, on the other hand, cannot be ‘expended’ at all. Abstract labor is a relation of social validation (Geltungsverhältnis) that is constituted in exchange. In exchange, the concrete acts of expended labor count as a particular quantum of value-constituting abstract labor, or are valid as a specific quantum of abstract labor, and therefore as an element of the total labor of society.

“This validation (Geltung) of privately expended concrete labor as a particular quantum of value-constituting abstract labor implies three different acts of reduction ….”

[Michael Heinrich. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. Alexander Locascio, translator. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2012. Pages 50-51.]

“… with regard to his arguments for the law of the rate of profit, Marx does not assume any particular form of market or conditions of competition, but rather solely the form of development of the forces of production typical of capitalism, the increasing deployment of machinery. If the law he derives at this level of abstraction is correct, then it must be valid for all developed capitalist economies.” [Michael Heinrich, “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s.” Alex Locascio, translator. Monthly Review. Volume 64, issue 11, April 2013. Pages 15-31.]

“… the high level of abstraction in ‘Capital’ comes at a price. Portraying the capitalist mode of production at the level of its ideal average also means that the intent is not an analysis of the capitalist mode of production in its concrete manifestations in space and time. Such an analysis would also not consist merely of supplementing general laws with concrete data. The capitalist mode of production does not exist at the level of an ‘ideal average’; it is always embedded in a concrete social and political web, and always possesses a historical character.” [Michael Heinrich, “Invaders from Marx: on the uses of Marxian theory, and the difficulties of a contemporary reading.” Left Curve. Issue 31, January 2007. Pages 83-88.]

“[Michael] Heinrich’s ‘social validation’ reading of Marx’s value theory refutes autonomist Marxist critiques of the relevancy of the law of value. These critiques centre on the novelty of ‘immaterial labour’ …. They suggest that immaterial labour is hegemonic in contemporary capitalist society. They argue that it undermines the operation of the law of value, demanding a radical rethinking of Marxian value theory.…

“Heinrich emphasises ‘social validation’ as the key principle of capitalist value. Accordingly, his account of crisis circulates around the ability of capitalists to realise value in exchange. Crisis is a failure of social validation. Capitalism’s crisis tendencies issue from a central contradiction. This is between the propensity of capitalists to produce and the capacity of society to consume. The antagonistic relations of distribution and property in capitalist society explode this contradiction. The overproduction of potential commodities by capitalists hell-bent on accumulation is an ever-present possibility.”

[Frederick H. Pitts, “Creative Industries, Value Theory, and Michael Heinrich’s New Reading of Marx.” tripleC: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation. Volume 13, number 1, 2015. Pages 192-222.]

“The development of crisis theory within the Marxian tradition has been central to much of our work in the last several years. The view that the various fragmentary references to crisis theory in the three volumes of Capital constitute a fully developed coherent structure, which only requires däigent exegesis, is a view that has never seemed sensible to us.…

“In [Karl] Marx’s work, no final presentation of his theory of crisis can be found. Instead, there are various approaches to explain crises. In the twentieth century, the starting point for Marxist debates on crisis theory was the third volume of Capital, the manuscript of which was written in 1864-1865. Later, attention was directed towards the theoretical considerations on crisis in the Theories of Surplus-Value, written in the period between 1861 and 1863.”

[Michael Heinrich, “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 64, issue 11, April 2013. Pages 15-31.]

“In [Karl] Marx’s view, the fall in the rate of profit is only an indirect cause of financial crises and downturns. He acknowledged that it reduces capitalists’ willingness to invest in production …, but his crisis theory is not one in which a fall in the rate of profit causes a fall in the rate of accumulation, which then causes an economic crisis, in a mechanical fashion.…

“Marx’s crisis theory can be characterized as an endogenous theory of recurrent crises. The downturn is endogenous because it is due to the dynamics of capitalism itself, not to external shocks (alone). The subsequent upturn is endogenous because the crisis itself generates conditions that lead to recovery; ad hoc external stimuli are not needed.”

[Andrew Kliman, “The Great Recession and Marx’s Crisis Theory.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 74, number 2, March 2015. Pages 236-277.]

“Though [Karl] Marx will develop his crisis theory at length in other, later works, and particularly in Capital, the essential moments of his argument are already present here [Communist Manifesto]. These moments are: (1) empirical observation of a single commercial crisis; (2) overcoming singular or idiosyncratic aspects of this crisis in order to link it to a series of cyclical crises; (3) charting a causal path between features internal to capitalism and these recurrent crises, thereby refuting the objection that crisis results from accident, from features external to capitalism, or that it can be controlled while remaining within the capitalist mode of production; and, finally, (4) suggesting that commercial crises will worsen as the mode of production known as capitalism develops.” [Amy E. Wendling, “Crisis Theory and the False Desire of Home Ownership.” Philosophy Today. Volume 55, number 2, May 2011. Pages 199-210.]

“Marxian crisis theory shows how difficulties in synchronizing activities around this circuit make capital liable to continuous breakdown and restructuring. The autonomist perspective emphasizes how these crises are, at root, problems in capital s control over human subjects, both cause and effect of contested social relations. Thus, for example, we can add to the work struggles at the point of production poor peoples movements that challenge the exclusion from consumption of the un- and underemployed, the multifarious mobilizations against the underfunding and degradation of the welfare state, and the green challenges to corporate environmental destruction. These contestations can link and interact with each other, producing a circulation of struggles that both mirrors and subverts the circulation of capital. These combinations can occur in sequences that start at different points and run in different directions.” [Nick Dyer-Witheford, “The New Combinations: Revolt of the Global Value-Subjects.” CR: The New Centennial Review. Volume 1, number 3, winter 2001. Pages 155-200.]

“Some sixty years ago, the British social scientist, T. H. Marshall articulated what has since become the paradigmatic conceptual framework for describing the relationship between social rights and citizenship. Until the twentieth century, Marshall thought, the expansion of citizenship rested on the achievement of political and civil rights. But in the twentieth century, the progress of citizenship began to depend on the diminution of inequality, or what Marshall called ‘class abatement.’ These ends, he believed, would be achieved by ‘incorporating social rights in the status of citizenship and thus creating a universal right to real income which is not proportionate to the market value of the claimant.’

“… Over the course of the twentieth century, social rights have been extended within many national borders in ways that have equalized material resources among individuals. Until the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, new social compacts came to recognize the value of preventing destitution and diminishing differences in status and resources among individuals. Britain, France, the Scandinavian countries, and the United States, among others, moved some distance towards enhancing equality and producing a more participatory civic and political life. To be sure, the poor, immigrants, and minority groups have found themselves with no greater voice in the polity than in the past; the well-off still dominate parliamentary elections and play leadership roles. Yet since the 1980s, even as social rights have narrowed, some groups – women, African-Americans in the United States, for example – have enjoyed greater access to the polity. This poses something of a puzzle. What is the relationship of social rights to democracy? Can we continue to expect, as Marshall did, that their expansion will produce more democratic results? Should we fear that a narrowing of social benefits will bring with it a narrower political sphere?”

[Alice Kessler-Harris, “Democracy, Liberty and Social Rights: An Introduction.” Democracy and Social Rights in the “Two Wests.” Torino, Italy: OTTO editore. 2009. Pages 3-18.]

“In terms of research strategy the orientation of our project is determined by our intention to develop an empirically grounded political crisis theory. In this respect our work differs, on the one hand, from economic crisis theories (which, for reasons to be elucidated below, we consider to be inadequate) and, on the other, from normative-analytical approaches in political science (i.e., the ‘cookbook’ approach of the administrative sciences).…

“… one conceptualizes crises not at the level of events but rather at the superordinate level of mechanisms that generate ‘events.’ According to this definition crises would be processes that vio late the ‘grammar’ of social processes.…

“State power subject to … contradictory demands [intervention versus absention from intervention and planning versus freedom] can determine its own strategies neither through general consensus of the citizenry nor through technocratic calculation; for one can neither desire nor calculate opportunistic action.

“However, this interventional power does not rest on itself but rather is constantly in danger of falling back into, or, being integrated into, the movement of individual capital units – which is regulated by competition; consequently, it must procure for itself a basis for overall legitimation. Thus because of the autonomization of the political-administrative system, the normative system must also be set free from the relationship of positive subordination and made so variable that it can satisfy the need of the political-administrative system for legitimation.”

[Claus Offe, “Crisis of Crisis Management: Elements of a Political Crisis Theory.” International Journal of Politics. Volume 6, number 3, fall 1976. Pages 29-67.]

“Frankfurt School theorists placed his [Sigmund Freud’s] work at the centre of twentieth-century critical theory. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist and gay critiques certainly called into question Freud’s stature, but in some ways they also enhanced it. Kate Millett called Freud ‘the strongest individual … force’ in the twentieth-century gender counter-revolution, which granted him great power. Other feminists, beginning with Juliet Mitchell, argued that psychoanalysis, far from being counter-revolutionary, actually laid bare the psychodynamics of sexism.…

“… the important question is whether psychoanalysis was, and can still be understood as, a critical theory, one that challenged the forms of domination and ideology that characterize our society, or whether it was an essentially conservative, anti-political and sexist body of thought.”

[Eli Zaretsky, “Bisexuality, Capitalism and the Ambivalent Legacy of Psychoanalysis.” New Left Review. Series I, number 223, May–June 1997. Pages 69-89.]

“… psychoanalysis is a method of treating nervous patients medically. And just at this point I can give you an example to illustrate how the procedure in this field is precisely the reverse of that which is the rule in medicine. Usually when we introduce a patient to a medical technique which is strange to him, we minimize its difficulties and give him confident promises concerning the result of the treatment. When, however, we undertake psychoanalytic treatment with a neurotic patient we proceed differently. We hold before him the difficulties of the method, its length, the exertions and the sacrifices which it will cost him; and, as to the result, we tell him that we make no definite promises, that the result depends on his conduct, on his understanding, on his adaptability, on his perseverance. We have, of course, excellent motives for conduct which seems so perverse, and into which you will perhaps gain insight at a later point in these lectures.” [Sigmund Freud. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. G. Stanley Hall, authorized translator. New York: Boni and Liveright Publishers. 1920. Page 1.]

“For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention, it is advantageous that the patient occupy a restful position and close his eyes ; he must be explicitly commanded to resign the critique of the thought-formations which he perceives. He must be told further that the success of the psychoanalysis depends upon his noticing and telling everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical. He must maintain impartiality towards his ideas; for it would be owing to just this critique if he were unsuccessful in finding the desired solution of the dream, the obsession, or the like.” [Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams. A. A. Brill, authorized translator. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1913. Page 82.]

“… the existential content of what it would mean for one to have a political identity at all— be it gender based, race based, or otherwise— cannot be fully addressed without paying attention to the technological milieu that is fundamentally a part of one’s cultural identity and meaning. Obviously, the more variables one adds, the more complicated the analysis becomes, but no matter how complex, one cannot avoid the issue of the most basic existential constituent of our lives: how we live through engaging with the ‘stuff’ that shapes our existence and survival.…

“… a truly existential Critical Theory must be antipatriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-colonial to be concretized, [so] the very conception of Critical Theory itself may have to be questioned from the bottom up. Critical Theory, if understood in terms of identity formation and political theorizing, is much too deeply rooted in the post-Enlightenment western European political tradition and much too abstractly formulated.”

[Yoko Arisaka, “Women Carrying Water: At the Crossroads of Technology and Critical Theory.” New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation. William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey Paris, editors. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001. Pages 155-174.]

“[Karl] Marx was notoriously vague about future society. It is ironic, then, that in the minds of most laymen he is often associated with a very specific utopian vision. As anyone familiar with Marx’s works will know, no blueprint for this vision actually exists. Nevertheless, it would be very misleading indeed to suggest that Marx left us no clues as to his thought on the future. The clues are there in much of what he wrote about the past and the present, in his analysis and criticism of class society, in his exposure and condemnation of exploitation. And the evidence is such that, despite all the feuds, debates and discussions about what Marx did or did not say or did or did not mean, there is almost universal agreement as to the value he hoped future society would promote: human self-realization. It is therefore important that advocates of Marx’s vision should take seriously and respond to criticism of this ideal.” [Nilou Mobasser, “Marx and Self-Realization.” New Left Review. Series I, number 161, January–February 1987. Pages 119-128.]

“The notion ‘Self-realization’ (Selbstverwirklichung) presupposes that the human individual creates itself. Precisely this means we possess a certain variety of intrinsic possibilities that we can actualize. The problem of self-realization is conceived in very different ways.…

“Orthodox Marxist-Leninists regard self-realization as quite identical with the ‘social tasks’ of man.…

“… level. For neo-Marxists, changing the world means humanization of the world and, consequently, realization of the human essence, i.e. self-realization. Changing the world and self-realization are to a certain degree identical but not in the Marxist-Leninist sense.”

[Assen Ignatow, “Self-Realization and Changing the World.” Studies in Soviet Thought. Volume 30, number 4, November 1985. Pages 387-395.]

“This article aims to make a case and set the foundations for retrieving Erich Fromm’s Freudo-Marxist theory of action and his approach to social domination in particular. To this end, Frommian psychoanalysis is compared with the ‘socio-analysis’ of Pierre Bourdieu.…

“When Bourdieu was beginning his studies in philosophy and sociology, Fromm’s career as a Freudo-Marxist scholar was already at its apogee (sociological journals, for example, were rife with citations to his work in the 1950s). Bourdieu also maintained a long interest in the so-called ‘Frankfurt School,’ of which Fromm was a core member throughout the 1930s. Indeed, given his critical stance towards the Frankfurt School, Bourdieu could not have missed the heated debate between Fromm and Marcuse in the mid-1950s, where Fromm was denigrated by his former colleague partly for reasons that should have brought him closer to sociology and Bourdieu at that (e.g. Fromm repudiated Freudian theory of human behaviour for biological fixity and insufficient attention to social influences …).”

[Leonidas K. Cheliotis, “For a Freudo-Marxist critique of social domination: Rediscovering Erich Fromm through the mirror of Pierre Bourdieu.” Journal of Classical Sociology. Volume 11, number 4, November 2011. Pages 438-461.]

“Considering the fact that ideology/ideologisation is part of human societal existence, ideology/ideologisation is not simply an either true or false form of consciousness but one of the organic and necessary components of the ontology of social existence. To be short: the way we think in is part of what we truly are. Our working consciousness is also co-actor in our actions.…

“Self-organising and self-performing homogenisations are being built by the partial complexes upon the heterogeneity of everyday practice unceasingly. It is the judicial process as particular reality-(re)construction from the analysis of which the present author has recently arrived at the ontologising reformulation of autopoietic theory,3 originally drafted in Chile in explanation of the biological reproduction of cells and, then, generalised as a methodological tool for macro-sociological theory, too.”

[Csaba Varga, “From the Ontology of Social Being to the Law’s Ontology.” Journal of Siberian Federal University. Volume 10, number 8, 2015. Pages 2002-2017.]

“The sociological paradigm I would offer … is ‘dialectic.’ It does not depreciate the constructive role the sociologist has to play in mapping the dimensions of order in social space; it simply insists that such order, if truly social in root and not simply a social manifestation of fundamentally biological, chemical, or physical responses or limitations, is relatively short-lived: that the apprehension of that order—magnified by the communication that defines the empirical—serves to free man from its compulsive repetition in the longer run. Such ‘feedback’ cannot be programmed in principle, for the knowledge that it has been programmed will in turn act as a new liberating factor, ad infinitum.

“What are the prospects for such an image? Surprisingly good. It steps on the sociological stage when the actors are sharply divided over whether the script should ring of ‘system’ or ‘conflict,’ offering scenes to both. The election of a Pole to the presidency of the International Sociological Association symbolizes the cross-fertilization in theoretical perspective that is beginning to take place between Marxist and non-Marxist social theorists; this in turn should guarantee serious attention to the dialectical mode on the part of an American sociology which had rejected it long ago when it discovered that its status models within the natural sciences had found [Friedrich] Engel’s extension of the dialectic to physical and biological phenomena of little utility.”

[Robert W. Friedrichs, “Sociological Paradigms: Analogies of Teleology, Apocalypse and Prophecy.” Sociological Analysis. Volume 32, number 1, spring 1971. Pages 1-6.]

“Fundamental to capitalism’s development has been its power to shift the cost of its ecological and social vandalism onto society as whole, by using the biosphere as a giant dunny down which it can flush its toxic wastes. More profits can accrue if the big capitalists don’t have to bother themselves with the elimination, neutralisation or recycling of industrial wastes. It’s much cheaper to pour toxic waste into the air or the nearest river. Rather than pay for the real costs of production, society as a whole subsidises corporate profit-making by cleaning up some of the mess or suffering the environmental and/or health costs.…

“At the same time, the impact of systematic polluting has been magnified by the profit-driven development of synthetic chemicals associated with the growth of the petrochemical and agribusinesses, and synthetic products (like plastics, pesticides and detergents) have been substituted for natural ones (like wood, leather and soap). The result is much more toxic wastes, such as those from chlorine-related (organochlorine) production — creating Frankenstein substances such as dioxin, PCBs and CFCs. The degree of toxicity associated with a given level of production has risen steadily since the middle of last century.”

[Terry Townsend, “Climate Change: A Marxist Analysis,” in Dave Holmes, Terry Townsend, and John Bellamy Foster. Change the system, not the climate!: A socialist view of global warming. Chippendale, New South Wales, Australia: Resistance Books. 2007. Pages 8-24.]

“… the critical humanist acknowledges the inevitable political and ethical role of all inquiry. As he or she develops a naturalistic ‘intimate familiarity’ with the lived experiences they study, they also recognize their own (self-reflexive) part in such study. There must be a reflexive self-awareness, part of which will entail their sense of an ultimate moral and political role in moving towards a social structure in which there is less exploitation, oppression and injustice and more creativity, diversity and equality. Embracing both a situated ethics of care (recognition, tolerance, respects for persons, love) and a situated ethics of justice (redistribution, equality) they recognize that research can never be wholly neutral or value free, since the core of inquiry is value driven: for a better world for all. Indeed impartiality may even be suspect; a rigorous sense of the ethical and political sphere is a necessity. Just why would one even bother to do research were it not for a wider concern or value?” [Ken Plummer, “A Manifesto for a Critical Humanism in Sociology: on Questioning the Human Social World.” Sociology: An Introductory Textbook and Reader. Daniel Nehring, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Google Play edition.]

“This essay is a critical humanist discussion of curriculum; a departure from the technicist view of education [education meant to support a global capitalist economy] and an analysis of curriculum considering critical humanism, political economy and critical race theory among other modes of critical analysis and inquiry. Our discussion supports a revolutionary curriculum: the turn from a static coercive system of domination where the everyday lives of students are controlled to a dynamic liberatory education where education supports a student’s imaginary …, creativity and their everyday practice of freedom ….…

“… socio-historical considerations, critiquing society, of critical humanism lie in both its ties and break from humanism.”

[Kevin Magill and Arturo Rodriguez, “A Critical Humanist Curriculum.” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. Volume 12, number 3, December 2014/January 2015. Pages 205-227.]

“A radical humanist perspection [a rarely used term for “perspective”] … frames a case that describes the formation of a countrywide, interorganizational service delivery system for psychiatric emergencies. Critical incidents demonstrate the use of dialogue as a method of change and inquiry within this perspective. The project was initiated and sponsored by the Mental Health Center in cooperation with the County Mental Health Board in response to complaints by the families of psychiatric patients that their needs in emergency situations were not being met. The project involved identifying relevant people, groups, and agencies; convening all parties involved; organizing members to complete a plan that would be presented to the board; and ending. The results suggest that dialogue is: 1. a metaphor for organization; 2. a clinical, collaborative method of inquiry in interorganizational fields; 3. a method of both inquiry and change in interorganizational fields; 4. a liberating process that leads to human development; and 5. rooted in radical humanism.” [Mary Ann Hazen, “A radical humanist perspective of interorganizational relationships.” Human Relations. Volume 47, number 4, April 1994. Page 393.]

“The radical humanist paradigm assumes that reality is socially created and sustained. It provides critiques of the status quo. It tends to view society as anti-human. It views the process of reality creation as feeding back on itself; such that individuals and society are prevented from reaching their highest possible potential. That is, the consciousness of human beings is dominated by the ideological superstructures of the social system, which results in their alienation or false consciousness. This, in turn, prevents true human fulfillment. The social theorist regards the orders that prevail in the society as instruments of ideological domination. The major concern for theorists is with the way such ideological domination occurs and finding ways in which human beings can release themselves. They seek to change the social world through a change in consciousness.” [Kavous Ardalan, “Globalization and Global Governance: Four Paradigmatic Views.” American Review of Political Economy. Volume 8, number 1, June 2010. Pages 6-43.]

“The radical humanist paradigm is defined by its concern to develop a sociology of radical change from a subjectivist standpoint. Its approach to social science has much in common with that of the interpretive paradigm, in that it views the social world from a perspective which tends to be nominalist, anti-positivist, voluntarist and ideographic. However, its frame of reference is committed to a view of society which emphasises the importance of overthrowing or transcending the limitations of existing social arrangements.

“One of the most basic notions underlying the whole of this paradigm is that the consciousness of man is dominated by the ideological superstructures with which he interacts, and that these drive a cognitive wedge between himself and his true consciousness. This wedge is the wedge of ‘alienation’ or ‘false consciousness,’ which inhibits or prevents true human fulfilment. The major concern for theorists approaching the human predicament in these terms is with release from the constraints which existing social arrangements place upon human development. It is a brand of social theorising designed to provide a critique of the status quo. It tends to view society as anti-human and it is concerned to articulate ways in which human beings can transcend the spiritual bonds and fetters which tie them into existing social patterns and thus realise their full potential.”

[Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan. Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 1992. Page 32.]

“The radical humanist paradigm … emphasizes how reality is socially created and sustained but ties analysis to an interest in what may be described as the pathology of consciousness. Here, people become members of an habitual domain that lies within the bounds of the reality they create. This perspective is based on the view that the reality creation is influenced by psychic and social processes which channel, constrain, and control the minds of human beings, in ways which tie them only to their created interests. Capitalism, for example, is viewed as essentially totalitarian ….” [Douglas K. Peterson, “Paradigms Found: Phronesis and Pragmatic Humanism for International and Domestic NGOs.” International Business Research. Volume 3, number 4, October 2010. Pages 36-42.]

“Theory building in radical humanism [takes] a … critical or evaluative stance. The goal of theory is to free organization members from sources of domination, alienation, exploitation, and repression by critiquing the existing social structure with the intent of changing it. Critical theory … is a prototypical example that demonstrates the paradigm’s theory-building characteristics. Critical theorists focus on two levels of understanding: a surface level and a deep-structure level, wherein the underlying sources of a given reality are presumed to reside. Major attention is given to the ways that power-holders (e.g., management) influence structuring processes that become part of a reified, taken-for-granted way of seeing. Critical theorists look at the ways that reified deep structures embedded in the status quo affect human action ….” [Dennis A. Gioia and Evelyn Pitre, “Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building.” Academy of Management Review. Volume 15, number 4, 1990. Pages 584-602.]

“… the radical humanist paradigm puts emphasis on radical change, on the modes of domination, emancipation, potentiality and deprivation.” [Cibeli Borba Machado and Nathália Helena Fernandes Laffin, “The Theory of Formal Organization from the Perspective of Burrell and Morgan’s Paradigms.” International Journal of Advances in Management and Economics. Volume 3, issue 1, January–February 2014. Pages 200-207.]

“Only a brief expose of the radical humanist paradigm is offered at this point to highlight the assumptions on which this critique is premised. The focus here is on the alienation that characterises industrial societies …. Individuals are endowed with unique self-consciousness, judgement, and free will, which enable them to create and interpret the essence of their existence …

“The radical humanist, in seeking to free human consciousness from universal alienation, notes that everything exists in an antagonistic relationship to itself, and that analysing this dialectic tension will lead to a state of ‘absolute knowledge’ in which the human spirit achieves its ultimate freedom …. In this mission, the radical humanist researcher can call on critical theory, among others, to ‘recognise, anticipate, and counter those systematic, socially unnecessary distortions of communicative interaction that reproduce domination and so hold us subtly captive’ ….”

[Ed Chung, Iris Jenkel, and Carolan McLarney, “Deconstructing paradise: Beneath the hegemonic illusions of harmony.” The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Volume 21, number 7, 2001. Pages 9-25.]

Diagram B

“Since reference and translation are in their turn based on material media, we might say that through media things cooperate in the production and reproduction of things. Specific media then could be seen as specific sets of material operations by which the things involved in one medium produce things, reflect and represent things, and reproduce themselves as material collectives. Hence, media function as operators by which the material world which surrounds us is generated in the first place. Media are ontogenetic machines. To put it simply, they are operative things that produce and assemble and reproduce things, including themselves.” [Lorenz Engell, “Ontogenetic machinery.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 169, September/October 2011. Pages 10-12.]

“There is a close connection between institutionalization and what [Antonio] Gramsci called hegemony. Institutions provide ways of dealing with conflicts so as to minimize the use of force. There is an enforcement potention in the material power relations underlying any structure, in that the strong can clobber the weak if they think it is necessary. But force will not have to be used in order to ensure the dominance of the strong to the extent that the weak accept the prevailing power relations as legitimate.” [Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies. Volume 10, June 1981. Pages 126-155.]

“… this paper attempts to offer one of the fascinating approaches to contemporary political economy as an anti-Positivism that is a Neo-Gramscianism approach. This approach is a critical international relations and international political economy approach which based on the political theories of Antonio Gramsci, Italian political theorist and journalist. Gramscian approach to the study of social and political phenomena is widely use in various fields of study, for example, political theory, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. However, Neo-Gramscianism leading by [Robert W.] Cox is special reference to the field of International Relations and International Political Economy ….” [Watcharabon Buddharaksa. Positivism, Anti-Positivism and Neo-Gramscianism: RCAPS Working Paper No. 10-4. December, 2010. Page 4. Retrieved on September 7th, 2015.]

“The paper introduces research on transatlantic relations done by neo-Gramscian authors. This research is distinctive by focusing on class in international relations and by using the concept of hegemony in a relational sense. Hegemony is leadership through the active consent of other classes and groups. A central question of this neo-Gramscian research is whether an international class of capitalists has emerged. Some authors have answered in the positive. This paper, however, maintains that hegemony in the international realm is still exercised by the American state, though its foreign economic policies have been greatly influenced by internationally-oriented corporations and that these actors have increasingly found allies among economic elites in other countries. The paper explores the relationship between hegemony by the American state and by internationally-oriented capital groups against the backdrop of transatlantic relations in the post-war period and the current debate on labor rights in international trade agreements.” [Christoph Scherrer. “‘Double Hegemony’? State and Class in American Foreign Economic Policymaking.” Amerikastudien. Volume 46, number 4, 2001. Pages 573-591.]

“This chapter addresses how critical international theory has evolved over the years. By first assessing the ideas of Frankfurt School theorists, it critically examines how the School’s critiques of authoritarianism and repression have influenced the thinking of early and later critical International Relations (IR) theorists. In doing so, it maps the emergence and the features of the various strands of critical international theory, including normative and political economy theory. The former strand encompasses the many implications of developing and applying Habermas’s communicative action theory to IR. More importantly, it underscores an important distinction between critical international theory—which integrates and extends Frankfurt School critical theory concepts and ideas to the international level—and a critical theory of international relations that adopts a core set of themes and concepts derived from international institutional processes such as law, economy, and politics, to produce empirical knowledge of these processes. I shall argue that critical IR theorists have made important strides towards realizing and formulating the requirements for a critical theory of international relations.” [International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity. Third edition. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith, editors. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Page 171.]

“The neo-Gramscian approach in International Relations (IR) is one of the most interesting and challenging we have in IR theory. The (maybe provoking) hypothesis of this article is, that neo-Gramscian theorists have so far failed in developing an appropriate theoretical and ontological framework, which could be applied for empirical research. Influential neo-Gramscian thinkers like Robert W. Cox and Susan Strange, do not show their readers a way to apply their highly interesting work to empirical oriented research. To come up with a framework that could be applied to empirical research is the goal of this article.” [Ulrich Hamenstädt, “In the shadows of the dialectic method: Building a framework upon the thoughts of Adorno and Gramsci.” Spectrum Journal of Global Studies. Volume 6, number 1, May 2014. Pages 1-17.]

“… I identify where and how giving in general and international aid in particular can be understood as both a mechanism of consent, compelling acquiescence of recipients to a material order of things, and a means of forging common identity and ideals among donors. This summarizes arguments that I have developed elsewhere at length and follows a ‘retroductive’ method of inquiry that is broadly consistent with a neo-Gramscian approach.” [Tomohisa Hattori, “Giving as a Mechanism of Consent: International Aid Organizations and the Ethical Hegemony of Capitalism.” International Relations. Volume 17, number 2, 2003. Pages 153-173.]

“There is no comprehensive theory of European integration from the perspective of transnational historical materialism or ‘neo-Gramscianism.’ …

“From a broadly conceived ‘neo-Gramscian’ perspective, countless contributions to an understanding of European integration in the 1980s and 1990s have appeared in the form of articles and conference papers.…

“… the process of European integration must be situated in the context of transatlantic and transnational class formation, not as an autonomous process (as is so often the case in ‘mainstream’ theories of European integration). The foundation, development, and periodic extension of European integration are fundamentally moments of the expansion of the Lockean heartland. This process itself, although its rhythm is dictated up to a point by the dynamic of American capital, is contradictory. The transatlantic linkage therefore fundamentally influences European integration, but it is not simply subject to or deterrrlined by American control.”

[Henk Overbeek, “Towards a Neo-Gramscian Theory of European Integration – The Example of the Tax Harmonisation Question.” Dimensions of a Critical Theory of European Integration. Hans-Jürgen Bieling and Jochen Steinhilber, editors. Marburg, Germany: Forschungsgruppe Europäische Gemeinschaften. 2000. Pages 59-81.]

“This study is an investigation of the foundations of hegemony, drawing and expanding on [Antonio] Gramsci’s insight about the need for an ‘ethico-political’ principle such as the nation, linking dominant and subordinate to attain hegemony.…

“… In this study, I undertake an investigation of the political/cultural foundations of hegemony—of the ideological and institutional preconditions for the legitimation of class rule. For that purpose, I introduce the notion of ‘mechanisms of class accommodation,’ which refers to the myths of community and inclusive (id)entities shaped by the systemic power of ruling classes. Aimed at de-classing social consciousness, preventing class unity and obscuring subordinate classes’ interest in an independent politics, the effect of these identities is to render the reality of class divisions politically irrelevant by stressing the allegedly fundamental, ‘organic’ unity of dominant and dominated.”

[Luis M. Pozo, “The roots of hegemony: The mechanisms of class accommodation and the emergence of the nation-people.” Capital & Class. Volume 31, number 1, spring 2007. Pages 55-88.]

“… we hope to make it clear that ‘critical IPE [international political economy]’ ‘should be viewed not as a singular but a collective and thus plural term, for although broadly committed to certain modes of [enquiring] into the world in which we live, [it] is defined by open and reflexive research’ …. Therefore, we seek to highlight the unifying moment among critical researchers, as well as the complex and diverse nature of such scholarship.” [Ian Bruff and Daniela Tepe, “What is critical IPE?” Journal of International Relations and Development. Volume 14, 2011. Pages 354-358.]

“… in the light of recent debates on the validity of the ‘transnational divide’ within the wider IPE [international political economy] community …, we demonstrate through these contributions that the distinction between the ‘critical’ and the ‘orthodox’ (or ‘empirical’) is only significant if the ‘critical’ is geared towards a larger, more substantial body of critical social enquiry and engages with what it means to conduct such enquiry.” [Claes Belfrage and Owen Worth, “Introduction – Critical international political economy: Renewing critique and ontologies.” International Politics. Volume 49, number 2, March 2012. Pages 131-135.]

“This article introduces Rosa Luxemburg’s work on dialectics and the international and argues that its ontological foundations have been neglected within critical International Political Economy (IPE). Whereas other critical Marxists such as [Antonio] Gramsci have played key roles in instigating critical enquiry, Luxemburg’s work has largely gone neglected. Although this article acknowledges some serious shortcomings in some of the ‘left infantilism’ inherent within her work, it nevertheless argues that Luxemburg’s dialectical ontology significantly contrasted with the orthodoxy that was emerging from Marxist circles at the time. This article explores some of these and argues that the dialectical method that Luxemburg employed to understanding the international provides us with a new avenue for critical IPE to pursue. In particular, it suggests that Luxemburg’s articulation of critique provides us with fresh openings that both compliment and add to neo-Gramscian and neo-Polanyian accounts, and allows us to understand trends and practices within the global political economy in new critical ways.” [Owen Worth, “Accumulating the critical spirit: Rosa Luxemburg and critical IPE.” Abstract. International Politics. Volume 49, number 2, March 2012. Pages 136-153.]

“Despite its epistemological roots in the work of [Karl] Marx and the Frankfurt School, critical IPE [international political economy] shuns taking an interest in aesthetics, too. It does so in two ways. First, in a gradual dilution of the core principles of Critical Theory, it has come to struggle to perform its nominal critical functions of critique, critical knowledge and emancipation implicit in the writings of Kant and Marx and central to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.…

“Second, there is a widespread aversion within critical IPE, and critical scholarship more generally, to the aestheticisation of politics and political economy.…

“… I want to outline briefly what engaging with the aesthetic in IPE, indeed an Aesthetic IPE, can bring and should involve at this historical conjuncture of deep capitalist ‘cultification.’ To pursue such a programme, aesthetics must be approached differently than in the orthodoxy’s Kantian imaginary, and accept a greater degree of aestheticisation of IPE itself than what critical IPE has tended to allow for. And, it starts with ontology.”

[Claes Belfrage, “Facing up to financialisation and the aesthetic economy: high time for aesthetics in international political economy!” Journal of International Relations and Development. Volume 14, number 3, July 2011. Pages 383-391.]

“The rape of the black woman and its ideological justification are integrally linked to the portrayal of the black man as a bestial rapist of white women—and, of course, the castration and lynching of black men on the basis of such accusations. Struggle against the sexual abuse of black women has demanded at the same time struggle against the cruel manipulation of sexual accusations against black men. Black women, therefore, have played a vanguard role, not only in the fight against rape, but also in the movement to end lynching.

“For black women, rape perpetrated by white men, like the social stereotype of black men as rapists, must be classed among the brutal paraphernalia of racism.

“Whenever a campaign is erected around a black woman who has been raped by a white man, therefore, the content of the campaign must be explicitly antiracist. And, as incorrect as it would be to fail to attack racism, it would be equally incorrect to make light of the antisexist content of the movement. Racism and male supremacy have to be projected in their dialectical unity. In the case of the raped black woman, they are mutually reinforcive.”

[Angela Davis, “Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape.” Ms. Magazine. Volume 12, number 2, spring 2002 (reprinted from 1975). Pages 37-40.]

“The exploitation of prison labor by private corporations is one aspect among an array of relationships linking corporations, government, correctional communities, and media. These relationships constitute what we now call a prison industrial complex. The term ‘prison industrial complex’ was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fi ll these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit. Social historian Mike Davis first used the term in relation to California’s penal system, which, he observed, already had begun in the 1990s to rival agribusiness and land development as a major economic and political force.” [Angela Y. Davis, “The Prison Industrial Complex.” The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo, editors. New York: McGraw-Hill imprint of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 2008. Pages 412-421.]

“This paper joins a broad discussion of the relationship between John Dewey’s pragmatism and the tradition of critical theory. In general terms, the historical relationship between pragmatism and critical theory is one in which the antifoundational and practice-oriented dimensions of pragmatism appear to exist in tension, if not outright conflict, with the emancipatory commitments of critical theory’s neo-Marxist legacy While Deweyan pragmatism is most often understood in its deliberative, experimental, open-ended, and contextual dimensions, little attention has been paid to the critical dimensions of Dewey’s thought. In what follows, I take initial steps in recovering the critical features of Dewey’s pragmatism by developing an analysis along two lines. First, I sketch the general contours of the relationship between pragmatism and critical theory in order to account for and unpack the long-standing hostility of critical theorists toward pragmatism. Second, I argue that these hostilities are unwarranted, and that they have been passed to us in the form of a persistent inability of critical theorists to appreciate the more radical features of Dewey’s pragmatism. In contrast to the prevailing characterizations of pragmatism, I argue that the philosophical underpinnings of Dewey’s pragmatism form the core of an enterprise which is both antifoundational and critical. Moreover, I hope that this effort will open avenues of inquiry into what might be called a model of ‘critical pragmatism.’” [Allison Kadlec, “Reconstructing Dewey: the philosophy of critical pragmatism.” Polity. Volume 38, number 4 October 2006. Pages 519-542.]

“In my view, ‘critical pragmatism’ shares with other critical theories the belief that genuine critical reflection and action must be morally calibrated and that we must appeal to principles of justice that can inform our critical capacities. Further, … I contend that Deweyan pragmatism is both ‘hermeneutically suspicious’ and geared toward viewing social inequalities as manifestations of power. While I believe that Deweyan pragmatism is up to the challenges that attend this definition of ‘critical,’ I eschew the idea that normative principles must be timeless truths anchored by a fixed Archimedean point or foundation. In contrast to mainstream views of critical theory, critical pragmatism insists that normative principles need not, in fact must not, be static entities or things of any kind.” [Allison Kadlec, “Critical Pragmatism and Deliberative Democracy.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. Number 117, December 2008. Pages 43-80.]

“… after having enumerated the basic methods by which advanced industrial societies effectively control and stagnate individual human development in Marcuse, and some moral implications of this stagnation in [Theodor] Adorno, I suggest that a certain type of critical pragmatism (a distinction rarely, if ever, made within the tradition itself) can be seen to reflect the type of unconstrained, free, open-ended development that the critical theorists would champion. Left uncriticized, however, pragmatic social development, like the one-dimensional citizens in [Herbert] Marcuse’s one-dimensional society, are left unaware that what appears to be free, open-ended development is actually only ever within the constraints of a totalitarian system of domination. Thus, as much as pragmatism might be able to help articulate the social psychology of human development that critical theorists would champion, it can only do so after that very critical theory is applied to their methodology of development to begin with, effectively purifying it from its naïveté.” [Clancy Smith, “A Critical Pragmatism: Marcuse, Adorno, and Peirce on the Artificial Stagnation of Individual and Social Development in Advanced Industrial Societies.” Kritike. Volume 3, number 2, December 2009. Pages 30-52.]

“Critical pragmatism as I understand it combines classical pragmatist conceptions of inquiry, meaning, and truth with the critical turn of our notions of rational discourse and professional competence that is at the heart of my work on critical systems heuristics and boundary critique.” [W. Ulrich, “Philosophy for professionals: towards critical pragmatism.” The Journal of the Operational Research Society. Volume 58, number 8, August 2007. Pages 1109-1113.]

“There is the Wittgensteinian way which I think is continued in [Donald] Davidson and [Robert] Brandom and, to some extent, [Hilary] Putnam—the people I like to lump Together as Neopragmatists. That way of thinking about language doesn’t treat language as anything special, or as a new topic for philosophical inquiry.” [Richard Rorty, “Worlds or Words Apart? The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies: An Interview with Richard Rorty.” Philosophy and Literature. Supplement 1, volume 26, number 2, October 2002. Pages 369-398.]

“To my pragmatic mind, part of … the disposable residue is the Socratic habit of asking ‘in virtue of what is a particular instance an example of piety, justice, etc.?’ I had thought [John] Dewey taught us to reject such essentialist questions, and to replace them with questions about what concrete alternatives to a putative instance of piety or justice are available in the situation at hand.” [Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein.” Political Theory. Volume 15, number 4, November 1987. Pages 564-580.]

“My first characterization of pragmatism is that it is simply anti-essentialism applied to notions like ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘language,’ ‘morality,’ and similar objects of philosophical theorizing. Let me illustrate this by [William] James’ definition of ‘the true’ as ‘what is good in the way of belief.’ This has struck his critics as not to the point, as unphilosophical, as like the suggestion that the essence of aspirin is that it is good for headaches. James’ point, however, was that there is nothing deeper to be said: truth is not the sort of thing which has an essence. More specifically, his point was that it is no use being told that truth is ‘correspondence to reality.’” [Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. Volume 53, number 6, August 1980. Pages 719-738.]

“I want now to enlarge on my claim that a pragmatist feminist will see herself as helping to create women rather than attempting to describe them more accurately. I shall do so by taking up two objections which might be made to what I have been saying. The first is the familiar charge that pragmatism is inherently conservative, biased in favour of the status quo. The second objection arises from the fact that if you say that women need to be created rather than simply freed, you seem to be saying that in some sense women do not now fully exist. But then there seems no basis for saying that men have done women wrong, since you cannot wrong the nonexistent.” [Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism.” Radical Philosophy. Number 59, autumn 1991. Pages 3-14.]

“There have been rumblings of late that the pragmatic method, despite its many benefits, is not capable of effecting truly radical social change. We hear that pragmatism’s emphases on deliberation and problem solving render it too inefficient to combat existing and concrete structures of oppression.…

“… It is a direct challenge to the existing system that relegates the technologically uninitiated poor to a condition of serfdom, and as such it is a both radical and ameliorative activity. Radical pragmatism gets at the root cause, and it devises means of changing an oppressive system for the better.”

[Jessica T. Wahman, “‘Fleshing Out Consensus’: Radical Pragmatism, Civil Rights, and the Algebra Project.” Education and Culture. Volume 25, number 1, spring 2009. Pages 7-16.]

“To see 1970 as the ‘end’ of the Cultural Revolution, or as a repudiation of it, would be a seri- ous exaggeration. 1970 was not 1967, but neither was it 1962. It represented, instead, an emerging synthesis of idealism and realism—the creation of a revolutionary pragmatism ….

“The reopening of Tsinghua University—China’s leading institution of science and technology—also reflected revolutionary pragmatism, by combining relative lenience toward intellectuals, a fairly strict policy toward Red Guards and students, and continued insistence on a more egalitarian and politicized program of education.…

“… As in the other policy areas, revolutionary pragmatism in education has created serious social tensions.…

“In this discussion of the major trends of 1970, we have argued that China has embarked on a series of policies which, collectively, can be labelled ‘revolutionary pragmatism.’”

[Harry Harding, “China: Toward Revolutionary Pragmatism.” Asian Survey. Volume 11, number 1, January 1971. Pages 51-67.]

“[Nicaraguan President Daniel] Ortega is a man who lives the war every day, and his off-the-cuff remarks reflect a pragmatic, political attitude towards what he sees, above all, as an issue of national interest.…

“It is therefore to under-estimate the entrenched nature of women’s subordination to suggest that a programme of emancipation can be decreed and implemented immediately in any society. Revolutions can accelerate the rate of change and strike at established practices. All such changes involve struggle but they still take place within the constraints of opposition and support existing in their societies.”

[Maxine Molyneux, “The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism, or Feminism in the Realm of Necessity?” Feminist Review. Number 29, summer 1988. Pages 114-132.]

“Even within ethnomethodology, a field allied with conversation analysis, scholars have realized the shortcomings of analyzing the lifeworld and conversations and neglecting to attend to the long-range effects. Some of these therefore called for a critical ethnomethodology, that is, a marriage between the field and (neo-) Marxist approaches …. The German critical psychologist Klaus Holzkamp … also made salient the problems inherent in analyzing the lifeworld alone.…

“I want to propose a slight shift in the paradigm of ethnomethodology (EM) towards an area which is often referred to as ‘critique.’

“For now, the term ‘critique’ is, in [Harold] Garfinkel’s technical sense, tendentious. That is: its ‘meaning’ cannot be stipulated in advance of the work it does within the paper. ‘Tendentiousness’ implies that you/I find out (and can only find out) what it means as you/I go along.”

[Alec McHoul, “Towards a Critical Ethnomethodology.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 11, number 4, November 1994. Pages 105-126.]

“Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as members’ methods of making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., ‘accountable,’ as organizations of commonplace everyday activities. The reflexivity of that phenomenon is a singular feature of practical actions, of practical circumstances, of common sense knowledge of social structures, and of practical sociological reasoning. By permitting us to. locate and examine their occurrence the reflexivity of that phenomenon establishes their study.” [Harold Garfinkel. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1967. Page vii.]

“… Garfinkel was intolerant of pseudo-studies, studies that just detail generalities. That is when one has a favorite generality and examines some ‘data’ in order to collect everything that demonstrates the veracity of the generality, ignoring (or never noticing) the rest. When it is done properly, social phenomenological analysis does not proceed by imagining illustrations, but by abandoning one’s truth habits and letting the local affairs carry oneself away with its own temporality. This is truly the phenomenological way to undertake research. Studies of jazz musicians that include no jazz music, studies of jurors where no legal matters are being addressed, and studies of science whose principal investigators never enter an operating laboratory are all varieties of pseudo-studies.” [Kenneth Liberman. More Studies in Ethnomethodology. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 2013. Pages 6-7.]

“For those of us interested in, and committed to, radical social transformations, systemic evolutionism is a very important strategic as well as analytical instrument. It lifts our eyes from the outrageousness of the situation and the evil of the enemy to the bases of his power. Dialectical evolutionism is not liberal progressivism turned upside down, interested only in swelling indignation at human misery. The possibilities of social transformation are not decided only—or even primarily—by indignation, but by a successful handling of the available levers of change and an effective neutralization of its obstacles.… A transformation to post-capitalism will require a systemic weakening of the power of financial and computer-guided capital—from algorithmic stock trading to Uber capitalism, in which the producers are turned into self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’—and the coalescence of new as well as old forces of opposition.” [Göran Therborn, “An Age of Progress?” New Left Review. Series II, number 99, May–June 2016. Pages 27-37.]

“There are, then, lasting progressive achievements from the 20ᵗʰ century. But the defeats of the left as that century drew to a close must also be understood. The dominant Euro-American school of thought cannot explain why this capitalist counter-revolution proved to be so successful. Marx had predicted a clash between forces and relations of production—one increasingly social in character, the other private and capitalist—that would sharpen over time. This was the Marxian Grand Dialectic and, shorn of its apocalyptic trappings, it was vindicated by the passage of time.…

“The Grand Dialectic had been suspended, even reversed. The triumph of neoliberalism was not simply a question of ideology; as Marxists should anticipate, it had a firm material basis.…

“Alongside the Grand Dialectic we can speak of a Little Dialectic, which envisaged capitalist development generating working-class strength and opposition to capital. This, too, went into retreat as the rich countries began to de-industrialize. Here we must recognize a structural transformation of epochal importance, reducing the weight of industry in developed capitalism, which began just before the peak of working-class power.”

[Göran Therborn, “Class in the 21ˢᵗ Century.” New Left Review. Series II, number 78, November–December 2012. Pages 5-29.]

“Marxism is nevertheless the major manifestation of the dialectics of modernity, in a sociological as well as theoretical sense. As a social force, Marxism was a legitimate offspring of modern capitalism and Enlightenment culture.…

“… The Marxist tradition has therefore tended to drift from one characterisation to another in its practice of the dialectics of modernity.…

“While twentieth-century Marxism is infinitely richer and broader than the tiny Western intellectual coterie of critical theory, it might be argued that, for all its limitations, critical theory has been the grandchild of [Karl] Marx that most explicitly, and persistently expressed an aspect of the historical quintessence of Marxism—its reflection on the dialectics of modernity.…

“… Marxism acquired its very special historical importance by becoming, from the 1880s till the 1970s, the main intellectual culture of two major social movements of the dialectics of modernity: the labour movement and the anti-colonial movement.…

“… The whole issue of the dialectics of modernity, and its class dialectic in particular, was less significant in the Americas and in Oceania.”

[Göran Therborn, “Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth-Century Marxism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 215, January–February 1996. Pages 59-81.]

“… it [Marxism] was a dialectical conception of modernity, seen as inherently contradictory. The modernity of capitalism and of the bourgeoisie was hailed, but at the same time attacked as exploitative and alienating. This dialectical understanding of modernity was, in a sense, the very core of Marxian thought. It affirmed the progressive nature of capitalism, of the bourgeoisie, even of capitalist imperialist rule (in ways that many would now find insensitive to the victims of colonialism), while at the same time not only denouncing them, but organizing the resistance against them.” [Göran Therborn, “After Dialectics.” New Left Review. Series II, number 43, January–February 2007. Pages 63-114.]

“… there is a true theory that governs nature, and there are observer specific theories of nature which materially exist although they may be false. The evolution of nature is governed by the true theory of nature and the evolution of the observer depends on their individual theories about nature. In effect, different initial conditions for observers create different trajectories. These observer trajectories are different from object trajectories; both object and observer trajectories are determined but they require different kinds of descriptions. In particular, the observer trajectory is a moral theory of the observer while the object trajectory is the material theory of objects. Objects and observers both exist in nature, but they are different kinds of matter: the observer is the theory about objects, which can potentially be incorrect. Questions of morality can thus be tackled in science by bringing theories which are presently in the Platonic world into the real world. The evolution of observers (as different from the evolution of objects) can thus be viewed as the theory of moral consequence and responsibility that arises from the discrepancy between reality and its theories. Morally correct action is that which follows a true theory of nature.

“While a mathematical theory of ethical naturalism is outside the scope of the current work, Moral Materialism sets up insights that can be used to develop such a theory in the future. This allows us to see how ideas about morality could be understood in a scientific theory that describes material objects as symbols of meaning.”

[Ashish Dalela. Moral Materialism: A Semantic Theory of Ethical Naturalism. Bangalore, India: Shabda Press. 2015. Kindle edition.]

“If reality is symbolic, then the space in which it exists is semantic. That is, different locations in space represent different meanings. In a semantic space, all changes must be discrete because knowledge always evolves discretely. If the space-time in which matter exists and evolves is semantic, then change must be described as the evolution of knowledge. Particles in classical physics are physically distinct and this distinctness is known by their unique locations, although they are of the same type— i.e. they are all particles. In a semantic space, distinct locations in space don’t just indicate a physically distinct object but also a conceptually distinct type of object. Thus, there are many identical particles in classical space, but no particle or symbol can be identical in semantic space because all locations identify different types of meanings.” [Ashish Dalela. Quantum Meaning: A Semantic Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Bangalore, India: Shabda Press. 2014. Pages 26.]

“My argument, building on the work of George Herbert Mead, and then extending Mead’s work to the dialogic thinking of David Bohm, is that selves are themselves a dialogic tangle of perspectives emerging from a pluralistic universe of perspectives.…

“My general theoretical claim is that much as it is believed that reflective thought arises through the inhibition of unproblematic activity …, a technique such as this variation of Bohmian dialogue is an ‘inhibition of the inhibition’ effected through proprioceptive suspension. These built up inhibitions are understood here as habitual and patterned modes of knowing and thinking that are normatively sensible (even required) and always retrospectively unproblematic. [David] Bohm sees this field or domain of the social self and its knowledge of the world as quite problematic.… Thought has become uncoupled from the body and we tend to live almost wholly within the flow of its representations (the Kantian imaginizing of perception …) with our bodies’ behaving unconsciously according to the social forces at play.… It is disturbing and/or it can open us up to a different way of experiencing the other through a re-patterning of thinking (i.e., changing neurological structures) that may be associated with the breakdown of prejudicial and overlearned perceptions and judgments.…

“David Bohm (1917-1992) was a theoretical physicist and philosopher who argued for an alternative view of the cosmos predicated on a non-canonical view of quantum physics insisting on an unbroken wholeness, or an ‘implicate order,’ that subtends manifestation and the ‘explicate order’ ….”

[Chris Francovich, “A Meadian Approach to Radical Bohmian Dialogue.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 1, 2017. Pages 98-128.]

“As a practice dialogue is meant to cultivate communication skills based initially on enhanced awareness of one’s own behavior and effect on others. This type of self-awareness is, following [David] Bohm, primarily cultivated through the dialogic principle of ‘suspension.’ Suspension involves the intentional bracketing of affective responses to verbal/social stimulus in a dialogue group setting.…

“Suspension is understood here as a self-reflective technique used to isolate and identify habitual responses to ordinary speech. The question to answer in terms of using this technique in dialogue is: Why do I need to not present to the ‘other’ in the dialogue circle my natural or habitual responses?”

[Chris Francovich, “Developing Proprioceptive Body Awareness in a Dialogue Circle.” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social and Community Studies. Volume 7, issue 1, 2013. Pages 13-23.]

“The power of the organizational culture model is its ability to make cultural differences explicit, show opportunities for better information exchange and feedback, and open a dialogue between and among the members of different cultures.” [C. Scott Smith, Chris Francovich, and Janet Gieselman, “Pilot Test of an Organizational Culture Model in a Medical Setting.” Health Care Manager. Volume 19, number 2, December 2000. Pages 68-77.]

“Language is part of social behavior. There is an indefinite number of signs or symbols which may serve the purpose of what we term ‘language.’ We are reading the meaning of the conduct of other people when, perhaps, they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the purpose is—just the glance of an eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response. The communication set up in this way between individuals may be very perfect. Conversation in gestures may be carried on which cannot be translated into articulate speech. This is also true of the lower animals. Dogs approaching each other in hostile attitude carry on such a language of gestures. They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack. Here is a process out of which language might arise, that is, a certain attitude of one individual that calls out a response in the other, which in turn calls out a different approach and a different response, and so on indefinitely. In fact, as we shall see, language does arise in just such a process as that. We are too prone, however, to approach language as the philologist does, from the standpoint of the symbol that is used. We analyze that symbol and find out what is the intent in the mind of the individual in using that symbol, and then attempt to discover whether this symbol calls out this intent in the mind of the other. We assume that there are sets of ideas in persons’ minds and that these individuals make use of certain arbitrary symbols which answer to the intent which the individuals had. But if we are going to broaden the concept of language in the sense I have spoken of, so that it takes in the underlying attitudes, we can see that the so-called intent, the idea we are talking about, is one that is involved in the gesture or attitudes which we are using. The offering of a chair to a person who comes into the room is in itself a courteous act. We do not have to assume that a person says to himself that this person wants a chair. The offering of a chair by a person of good manners is something which is almost instinctive. This is the very attitude of the individual. From the point of view of the observer it is a gesture. Such early stages of social acts precede the symbol proper, and deliberate communication.” [George Herbert Mead. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Charles W. Morris, editor. Chicago, Illinois: Phoenix Books imprint of The University of Chicago Press. 1967. Pages 13-14.]

“In a dialogue, … nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, whereas the other game is win-lose – if I win, you lose. But a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

“Clearly, a lot of what is called ‘dialogue’ is not dialogue in the way that I am using the word. For example, people at the United Nations have been having what are often considered to be dialogues, but these are very limited. They are more like discussions – or perhaps trade-offs or negotiations – than dialogues. The people who take part are not really open to questioning their fundamental assumptions. They are trading off minor points, like negotiating whether we have more or fewer nuclear weapons. But the whole question of two different systems is not being seriously discussed.”

[David Bohm. On Dialogue. Lee Nichol, editor. London and New York: Routledge Classics imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Pages 7-8.]

“In order that the general language and its mathematization shall be able to work together coherently and harmoniously, these two aspects have to be similar to each other in certain key ways, though they will, of course, be different in other ways (notably in that the mathematical aspect has greater possibilities for precision of inferences). Through a consideration of these similarities and differences, there can arise what may be called a sort of ‘dialogue’ in which new meanings common to both aspects are created. It is in this ‘dialogue’ that the wholeness of the general language and its mathematics is to be seen.” [David Bohm. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London and New York: Routledge Classics imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 188-189.]

“A … striking example of implicate order can be demonstrated in the laboratory, with a transparent container full of a very viscous fluid, such as treacle, and equipped with a mechanical rotator that can ‘stir’ the fluid very slowly but very thoroughly. If an insoluble droplet of ink is placed in the fluid and the stirring device is set in motion, the ink drop is gradually transformed into a thread that extends over the whole fluid. The latter now appears to be distributed more or less at ‘random’ so that it is seen as some shade of grey.” [David Bohm. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London and New York: Routledge Classics imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 199-200.]

“The conjunction of the terms ‘sensation’ and ‘mass culture’ might misleadingly suggest, moreover, that I am about to make a Frankfurt School–style argument about the always mesmerizing and pernicious effects of the new mid-nineteenth-century culture industries; it should be clear by now that I am not going to do that. This does not mean, however, that I will simply celebrate sensational popular cultures as sites of resistance and discount the effects of industrialized and commodified modes of cultural production and reception, as cultural studies scholars have sometimes been accused of doing. The culture of sensation does indeed bear some of the responsibility for the long U.S. history of nativism, empire-building, and white egalitarianism. Although I argue that the responses to these issues among the producers and consumers of the culture of sensation were diverse rather than routinized and utterly predictable, it nonetheless remains generally true that … early forms of U.S. popular culture ‘created national identity from the subjugation of its [nonwhite] folk.’” [Shelley Streeby. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2002. Page 28.]

“Only when philosophy discovers in the dialectical course of history the traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise legitimates: mankind’s evolution toward autonomy and responsibility. My … thesis is thus that the unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed.

“In a sense, this is a task that calls for a critical theory of collective memory, a re-collection (anamnesis) of what our culture has refused to recognize and to see. With nature’s gift of sight comes a certain calling—and the pressure of a normativity grounded only in the gift of nature itself. Through this calling, we are enjoined to take historical responsibility for our ability to be responsive.”

[David Michael Levin. The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1999. Page 17.]

“Although feminist theorists seem to undermine essential properties of the Enlightenment self, they are also unable to abandon it fully. The relations of feminist theorizing to the postmodernist project of deconstructing the self and the Enlightenment are necessarily ambivalent. In many ways women never ‘had’ an Enlightenment. Enlightenment discourse was not meant to include women, and its coherence depends partially on our continuing exclusion. Concepts such as the autonomy of reason, objective truth, and universally beneficial progress through scientific discovery are very appealing, especially to those who have been defined as incapable or merely the objects of such feats. Furthermore it is comforting to believe that Reason can and will triumph—that those who proclaim such ideals as objectivity and truth will respond to rational arguments. If there is no objective basis for distinguishing between truth and false beliefs, then it seems that power alone may determine the outcome of competing truth claims. This is a frightening prospect to those who lack or are oppressed by the power of others.” [Jane Flax. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1990. Page 230.]

“A focus on critical analysis of [social] systems, particularly in regard to issues of power, oppression, and emancipation, became highlighted as a requirement in using systems approaches…. Furthermore, beyond the issues of power and emancipation, which became a defining characteristic of CST [critical systems theory], the strengths and weaknesses of different systems methods led to a focus on pluralism of methodologies, recognizing these strengths and weaknesses and using approaches in combination for different contexts and purposes. Accordingly, the commitment to critique, emancipation, and pluralism form the three core values and philosophy of CST.” [Sunnie Lee Watson and William R. Watson. Critical Systems Theory for Qualitative Research Methodology. Pages 6-7.]

“A critical social systems theory is a critical theory of social systems. It combines the stance of critical theory as represented by, e.g., [Jürgen] Habermas and Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School philosophers like Ernst Bloch – a theory which has its roots in the weltanschauung of Karl Marx – and a system theoretical view, in particular, science of complexity insights provided by Evolutionary Systems Theory (EST) applied to the domain of social systems and going back to General System Theory (GST) as inaugurated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy among others.” [Christian Fuchs and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, “Autopoiesis and Critical Social Systems Theory.” Autopoiesis in Organization Theory and Practice. Rodrigo Magalhães and Ron Sanchez, editors. Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing. 2009. Pages 111-129.]

“I claim that the path back to [Herbert] Marcuse leads to a new critical theory. The new critical theorists speak about liberation in plural and multidimensional voices and yet do so while being historically and materially linked to ongoing struggles.” [Martin Beck Matuštík, “Back to the Future: Marcuse and New Critical Theory.” New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation. William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey Paris, editors. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001. Kindle edition.]

“I would like to characterize Drucilla Cornell and Sara Murphy’s essay ‘Anti-racism, multiculturalism, and the ethics of identification’ as a rearticulation of the aims of the politics of identity and difference in terms of a radical existential ethics of freedom.… I can highlight how their work develops a new critical theory of multiculturalism.…

“… By situating Cornell and Murphy’s work on the trajectory between existential variants of critical theory and a new critical theory of multiculturalism, I am able to distinguish the ways in which their work intervenes in several current multicultural debates.”

[Martin Beck Matuštík, “Contribution to a new critical theory of multiculturalism: A response to ‘Anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification.’” Philosophy & Social Criticism. Volume 28, number 1, 2002. Pages 473-482.]

“Humanity … is just one example of the postulation of free creatures with the capacity of shaping their own moral destiny. Our argument is that the demand for multiculturalism is the freedom to struggle for a different humanity, for the possibility of living otherwise than through the cultural hierarchies imposed by colonialism.

“… in a multicultural curriculum designed to meet what we mean by fairness students should be exposed not only to different languages but to the history of those languages within our country. Take Spanish to illustrate our point: the United States has the fifth-biggest Spanish-speaking population in the world so there are obviously practical reasons why US students should study the Spanish language.”

[Drucilla Cornell and Sara Murphy, “Anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification.” Philosophy & Social Criticism. Volume 28, number 1, 2002. Pages 419-449.]

“The participants’ accounts indicate that critical reflection, informed by critical postmodern analysis, enabled them to achieve the emancipatory aims of feminist practice in a number of ways.…

“Drawing on Foucauldian notions of power, which construct power as exercised or enacted, … enabled practitioners to recognise that power is also inscribed within discourse, rather than exclusively residing in social structure …. Power in this sense is also the capacity to influence, manipulate or re-author discourse …. For some participants, this reconstruction of power occurred through the rejection of the implicit assumption that egalitarianism means a reduction of power for someone else. As acknowledged elsewhere …, practitioners’ accounts revealed that power may operate differently and be used in various ways indifferent contexts, and in relation to different people. Participants’ reconstructed accounts additionally rejected initial assumptions about power from being an unequivocally negative force, to recognise that it can also be productive. Critical postmodern thinking also enabled practitioners to reconstruct power in more fluid and contextual terms, which allowed them to understand that they could assist services users to exercise power through influencing the discourse surrounding their situations. In this way, critical postmodern theory contributed to practitioners understanding power as being embedded in social interactions and contexts, not just in social structures, and that what is important about power is how it is used and expressed ….”

[Christine Morley. Practising Critical Reflection to Develop Emancipatory Change. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Page 194.]

“We start with a broad-brushstroke picture of our approach to critical reflection …. Overall our approach is founded on an understanding of the individual in society, and how the surfacing of assumptions held by individual people about their social worlds may ultimately lead to a capacity to change the ways people act in relation to their social contexts. Critical reflection, from our perspective, is therefore a process (and theory) for unearthing individually held social assumptions in order to make changes in the social world. In our approach, then, reflection is more than simply thinking about experience. It involves a deeper look at the premises on which thinking, actions and emotions are based. It is critical when connections are made between these assumptions and the social world as a basis for changed actions.

“Let us look at the three main features of this approach:

[Jan Fook and Fiona Gardner. Practising Critical Reflection: A Resource Handbook. New York: Open University Press imprint of McGraw Hill Education. 2007. Page 14.]

“I began the Real Utopias Project in the early 1990s as an attempt at deepening serious discussion of alternatives to existing structures of power, privilege and inequality. The idea of the project was to focus on specific proposals for the fundamental redesign of different arenas of social institutions rather than on either general, abstract formulations of grand designs, or on small immediately attainable reforms of existing practices. This is a tricky kind of discussion to pursue rigorously. It is much easier to talk about concrete ways of tinkering with existing arrangements than it is to formulate plausible radical reconstructions. [Karl] Marx was right that detailed blueprints of alternative designs are often pointless exercises in fantasy. What I and my collaborators in the Real Utopias Project wanted to achieve was a clear elaboration of workable institutional principles that could inform emancipatory alternatives to the existing world. This falls between a discussion simply of the moral values that motivate the enterprise and the fine-grained details of institutional characteristics.”

[Erik Olin Wright. Envisioning Real Utopias. Brooklyn, New York: Verso imprint of New Left Books. 2010. Verso ebooks edition.]

“… I propose a power–centered framework for addressing these issues anchored in the idea of ‘real utopias.’ At its core, this proposal revolves around transforming power relations within the economy in ways that deepen and broaden the possibility of meaningful democracy.…

“The idea of real utopias embraces this tension between dreams and practice: utopia implies developing visions of alternatives to dominant institutions that embody our deepest aspirations for a world in which all people have access to the conditions to live flourishing lives; real means proposing alternatives attentive to problems of unintended consequences, self-destructive dynamics, and difficult dilemmas of normative trade-offs. A real utopian holds on to emancipatory ideals without embarrassment or cynicism but remains fully cognizant of the deep complexities and contradictions of realizing those ideals.”

[Erik Olin Wright, “Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias.” American Sociological Review. Volume 78, issue 1, 2012. Pages 1-25.]

“By the time I began working on this [book], however, my ideas had evolved sufficiently that it no longer made sense to write a book that mainly recapitulated what I had written in Envisioning Real Utopias. My focus of attention had shifted from establishing the credibility of a democratic-egalitarian alternative to capitalism to the problem of strategy, how to get from here to there. What I initially planned as a short distillation of my 2010 book had become more of a sequel.…

“I decided to use the more encompassing term ‘anticapitalist’ because much of the argument of the book is relevant for people who oppose capitalism but are skeptical about socialism. I hope that my arguments convince at least some people that radical socialist economic democracy is the best way of thinking about a realizable destination beyond capitalism, but I did not want the book to seem relevant only to people who already agree with that vision.”

[Erik Olin Wright. How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21ˢᵗ Century. Brooklyn, New York: Verso imprint of New Left Books. 2019. Verso ebooks edition.]

“As an explanatory theory of society, False Necessity seeks to free social explanation from its dependence upon the denial of our freedom to resist and to remake our forms of social life. It offers a relentlessly anti-necessitarian view that nevertheless generates a broad range of social and historical explanations: some comprehensive and abstract, others focused and concrete. It carries to extremes the thesis that everything in society is politics, mere politics, and then draws out of this seemingly negativistic and paradoxical idea a detailed understanding of social life.

“As a program for social reconstruction, False Necessity shows how we may carry forward the radical project of freeing our practical and passionate dealings from the constraints imposed upon them by entrenched social roles and hierarchies. It argues that the best hope for the advancement of this radical cause – the cause that leftists share with liberals – lies in a series of revolutionary reforms in the organization of governments and economies and in the character of our personal relations. The explanatory and programmatic ideas of the book are closely connected: each supports the other, and each expresses an aspect of the vision that both share.”

[Roberto Mangabeira Unger. False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy. Brooklyn, New York: Verso imprint of New Left Books. 2004. Verso ebooks edition.]

“[Karl] Marx stated the relation between enlightenment and emancipation from false necessity in the most powerful and uncompromising way. The social world was not a natural order, but a domain of collective struggle, constraint, and acceptance. The material relations of society were real relationships of domination and dependence among people. The whole structure of society was the expression of temporary constraints and particular contests rather than part of the inherent nature of things. Economic growth, which had once required oppression, would soon make it superfluous. The role of social thought, as an accomplice of emancipatory social practice, was to demystify society and to reveal it to itself.”

[Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Page 138.]

“The influence of sequence, which so often serves the cause of the conservative reformer, also helps explain why we find less variety in the history of institutional forms than a justified skepticism about the deep-seated necessity of past or present institutions might lead us to expect. The record of experiments with the organization of military and economic activity is too messy to exemplify a table of correspondences between particular levels of capability and particular institutional systems. But it is also too tainted by narrowing obsessions and imitations and by privileged strangleholds on social resources to demonstrate the untrammeled freedom of invention that in our most optimistic moments we may be tempted to claim. It is because of the influence of what comes before on what comes after that our institutional settlements and inventions can have both an ad hoc, pasted-together quality and a surprising repetitiveness.

[Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pages 209–210.]

“This study has thrown new light on students’ experiences of developing reflective skills. They described changes in their behaviour resulting from perspective transformation. Whilst the degree of transformation varied, for all but one of these students this was described as a liberating process.… They found that previous education, socialization and the culture of the organization were all influential in determining students’ responses to learning from experience ….

“The findings from this study suggest that the integration of reflection within the ANP [advanced nurse practitioners] Master’s degree programme was beneficial for the majority of students. They have painted a picture of personal and professional development. They viewed reflection as now part of their lives, assisting them with the implementation of their roles as ANPs and leading them to more astute political behaviour.”

[Jane E. Glaze, “Reflection as a transforming process: student advanced nurse practitioners’ experiences of developing reflective skills as part of an MSc programme.” Journal of Advanced Nursing. Volume 34, number 5, June 2001. Pages 639-647.]

“If … the evidence of musical production during the 1950s and 1960s testifies that musicians were in the cultural vanguard, why has there been so little discussion of their role?

“While recognizing that several factors no doubt contribute to this absence, I sketch briefly a partial explanation that locates one source within the broader paradigm of chaotics itself. My argument is this: the concept of information that has developed from the scientific and technological domains of this paradigm and that has significantly and generally filtered into modes of thought at the millennial divide has inhibited writing about music.”

[Judy Lochhead, “Hearing chaos.” American Music. Volume 19, number 2, summer 2001. Pages 210-246.]

“[Judy] Lochhead’s study, in particular, centers on the previously overlooked role played by musicians, particularly composers, during the 1950s and 1960s in ‘disclosing the new paradigm of “chaotics.”’ Less well recognized, however, is the important role of chaos theory in recent critical interpretations of music. My aim in this article is thus to examine some of the manifestations of chaos in music overlooked in recent scholarship and also to examine the relationship of chaos theory to various aspects of critical theory.” [Kenneth McLeod, “Interpreting Chaos: The Paradigm of Chaotics and New Critical Theory.” College Music Symposium. Volume 45, 2005. Pages 42-56.]

“CRT [critical race theory] recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colorblind, however, CRT challenges this legal ‘truth’ by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. CRT also recognizes that liberalism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege. These stories paint a false picture of meritocracy; everyone who works hard can attain wealth, power, and privilege while ignoring the systemic inequalities that institutional racism provides.

“Intersectionality within CRT points to the multidimensionality of oppressions and recognizes that race alone cannot account for disempowerment.”

[“What is Critical Race Theory?” University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Affairs. Undated. Retrieved on September 27th, 2015.]

“I provide theoretical foundations for these two views of a post-racial era, in terms of the eliminativist theories of race and the behavioral theory of racism, and critically examine them. The eliminativist theories of race seek to eliminate the concept of ‘race’ from general discourse because we do not have adequate criteria for race that can adequately categorize any groups of people as distinct races. Such elimination of ‘race’ from general discourse may be said to indicate an idea of a post-racial era in a nominalist sense. The behavioral theory of racism argues that racism must be manifested in obviously harmful actions.” [Polycarp Ikuenobe, “Conceptualizing and Theorizing About the Idea of a “Post-Racial” Era.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 43, issue 4, December 2013. Pages 446-468.]

“I approach the concept of ‘race’ in two ways. First, it is a way of life, a fundamental product of Western cultures, deeply embedded in the European colonial past, lived out in the present as a taken-for-granted reality. Secondly, it is an analytical concept that has conditioned both academic and everyday ways of interpreting the world around us. For cultural geographers, it is important that ‘race’ was part of our earliest efforts, rooted in the geographical lore that accompanied the first European voyages of exploration that brought knowledge, riches, and power to the imperial/colonial dynasties. It was developed as a fully fledged theoretical system by Enlightenment thinkers whose treatises on such far-fetched theories as environmental determinism fit so neatly with the purposes of expanding European powers and with the by then highly developed sense of European cultural superiority and civilization.” [Audrey Kobayashi, “Critical ‘Race’ Approaches to Cultural Geography.” A Companion to Cultural Geography. James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004. Pages 238-249.]

“ … [Some l]egal theorists … juxtapose the voice that “allows theorists to discuss liberty, property, and rights in the aspirational mode of liberalism with no connection to what those concepts mean in real people’s lives” with voices of people whose voices are rarely heard in law. In neither nor literature, however, is the goal merely to replace one voice with opposite. Rather, the aim is to understand both legal and literary course as the complex struggle and unending dialogue between these voices.

“The metaphor of ”voice“ implies a speaker. I want to suggest, however, that both the voices I have described come from the same source, a source I term ”multiple consciousness.“ It is a premise of this article that we are not born with a ”self,“ but rather are composed of a welter of partial, sometimes contradictory, or even antithetical ”selves.“ A unified identity, if such can ever exist, is a product of will, not a common destiny or natural birthright. Thus, consciousness is ”never fixed, never attained once and for all“; it is not a final outcome or a biological given, but a process, a constant contradictory state of becoming, in which both social institutions and individual wills are deeply implicated. A multiple consciousness is home both to the first and the second voices, and all the voices in between.

[Angela P. Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.” Stanford Law Review. Volume 42, number 3, February 1990. Pages 581-616.]

“The central drama for which the [Communist] Manifesto is famous is the development of the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the struggle between them. But we can find a play going on within this play, a struggle inside the author’s [Karl Marx’s] consciousness over what is really going on and what the larger struggle means. We might describe this conflict as a tension between Marx’s ‘solid’ and his ‘melting’ visions of modern life.

“… [Marx] sets out to present an overview of what is now caned the process of modernization, and sets the stage for what Marx believes will be its revolutionary climax. Here Marx describes the solid institutional core of modernity. First of all, there is the emergence of a world market. As it spreads, it absorbs and destroys whatever local and regional markets it touches. Production and consumption – and human needs – become increasingly international and cosmopolitan. The scope of human desires and demands is enlarged far beyond the capacities of local industries, which consequently collapse. The scale of communications becomes worldwide, and technologically sophisticated mass media emerge. Capital is concentrated increasingly in a few hands. Independent peasants and artisans cannot compete with capitalist mass production, and they are forced to leave the land and close their workshops. Production is increasingly centralized and rationalized in highly automated factories.”

[Marshall Berman. Adventures in Marxism. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1999. Pages 100-101.]

“In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. This is a broader and more inclusive idea of modernism than those generally found in scholarly books. It implies an open and expansive way of understanding culture; very different from the curatorial approach that breaks up human activity into fragments and locks the fragments into separate cases, labeled by time, place, language, genre and academic discipline.…

“If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no mode of modernism can ever be definitive. Our most creative constructions and achievements are bound to turn into prisons and whited sepulchres that we or our children, will have to escape or transform if life is to go on.”

[Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc. 1988. Pages 5-6.]

“All that is Solid Melts into Air unfolds a dialectic of modernization and modernism. ‘To be modern,’ as I define it at the book’s beginning and end, ‘is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in this maelstrom, … to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.’ Modernism aims ‘to give modern men and women the power to change the world that is changing them, to make them the subjects as well as the objects of modernization.’” [Marshall Berman, “The Signs in the Street: a response to Perry Anderson.” New Left Review. Series I, number 144, March–April 1984. Pages 114-123.]

“To claim that a particular belief system is ideological, in the evaluative sense, is to impute to the system of belief some negative characteristic(s) that provides a reason to reject it (or at least some significant part of it) in its present form. I will refer to such an evaluative conception of ideology as a critical conception.

“There are strong and weak critical conceptions of ideology. On a strong conception, the fact that a system of thought is ideological is a sufficient reason to reject it (or some significant part of it). Whereas on a weak conception, the fact that a belief system is ideological is, in some sense, an unfortunate fact about it, but it is not a sufficient reason to reject it as such. In the sections below, I develop a strong critical conception of ideology. I will treat that conception as my general account and will understand weak senses in terms of how they are related to, but deviate from, that account.”

[Tommie Shelby, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory.” The Philosophical Forum. Volume XXXIV, number 2, summer 2003. Pages 153-188.[

“… [Regarding] the word internationality: … the coinage was not a success and seems to have lain unused since the middle of the last century. By way of a conclusion, I propose to rehabilitate the word, in order to indicate the basis upon which I think the theory of nationhood ought now to develop. I shall use it to express a concept which, although it is implicit in much recent work on nationhood, perhaps deserves to be spelt out and discussed more clearly.…

“… My proposal is that, in the same way that … individual texts can function only within a field of general intertextuality, so individual nations arise only within a field of general internationality; or, in other words, that the logic of internationality precedes the formation of nations.”

[Jonathan Rée, “Internationality.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 60, spring 1992. Pages 3-11.]

“The Arab Left emerged in the context of anti-colonial struggles. Its discourse was formed in the era of Third World national liberation movements in the wake of World War II and the ascendance of the Soviet Union as a second world power on a par with the United States. Its discourse has hardly evolved since that era, for many reasons. First, there is the incompletion to this day of national liberation projects, arising from the objective impossibility of achieving their goals within the borders set up by colonialists for the purpose of holding the territories they mark at bay: dependent, socially distorted and devoid of emancipatory potential. Second, there is the lack of significant intellectuals – with the exception of Mahdi Amel [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, مَهْدِيّ عَامِل, Mahdiyy ʿĀmil], Samir Amin [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, سَمِير أَمِين, Samīr ꞌAmīn] and a few others – who are capable of delving into the social and economic structures and formations in order to demarcate those segments of society that have the most interest in progressive change. Third, there is the authoritarian and Stalinist structures of most Arab leftist parties, which disable critical thinking and theoretical argumentation. Party education, at best, has been limited to echoing the opinions of the political bureau and chairman of the party, while indoctrinating party members to view their decisions in the same way that the adherents of religious currents view the scriptural interpretations of their leaders.” [Hisham Bustani, “Dissonances of the Arab Left.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 184, March/April 2014. Pages 35-41.]

“… [The] political appropriation of psychoanalysis cannot accurately be called utopian, since those who advanced it were generally Marxists for whom the idea of utopia was, at least in theory, impermissible. But to borrow—with due irony—a term from the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow …, it might well be called ‘eupsychian,’ since the transcendent condition to which it aspires, though not necessarily one of social perfection, is one of intrapsychic ease, release and satisfaction.” [Barry Richards, “The Eupsychian Impulse: Psychoanalysis and Left politics since ’68.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 48, spring 1988. Pages 3-13.]

“Roughly, in accordance with the model of the philosophy of the subject, emancipation amounts to the fulfIllment of the possibilities and potentialities of the present. However, in accordance with the model of interpersonal, communicative relations, emancipation involves the qualitative transformation of our needs, pleasures, and self-understanding; in short, it conceives of emancipation as transfiguration.…

“… As figures of non-identity autonomous art and feminism critically install the remembrance and anticipation of an other reason, of reason as for the other, of reason transfigured.”

[J. M. Bernstein, “The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 47, autumn 1987. Pages 21-29.]

“… [One] construct is the Critical Theory–Green Theory and Climate Change. Critical Theory has an ambient platform that helped to formulate a Green Theory in International Relations and provides a rationale on climate change and sustainable development. Critical Theory rejects the piecemeal, ‘problem-solving’ approaches that fail to address the social and economic structures of domination perpetuated by global hegemony. Green Theory focuses on the critical issues of environmental domination and marginalization--domination of a non-human nature, neglect of future generational needs, and the skewed distribution of ecological risks among different social classes, states and regions. Green Theory repudiates the lopsided frames of causes and consequences of climate change with an advocacy of equity and sustainability. Green Theory is premised on the quest to reduce ecological risks across the board and preventing unfair externalization and displacement through space and time onto innocent third parties.” [W. Lawrence S. Prabhakar, “Climate Change and National Security: Issues, Linkages and the Indian Context.” Energy Security Challenges: Non Traditional Security Planning in India. Elamkulam, Kochi, India: CPPR-Centre for Strategic Studies, Kochi Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR). 2015. Pages 28-34.]

“This paper seeks to examine the valuable concept of left agency and interrogate it in terms of an inherent paradox not immediately apparent to many who support the role of politicised activists in the workplace. This paradox is that politicised workplace activists, particularly those belonging to revolutionary organisations, may in presenting an overtly political agenda centred on extra-workplace issues actually have weakened resistance against management’s aggressively profit-oriented agenda, particularly in the key period of the late-1970s and early 1980s.…

“… we return to the paradox at the heart of this examination of Left Agency. While classical Marxism and indeed Leninism are in no doubt that the working class is at the centre of the socialist project in both structural and ‘agency’ terms, most organisations laying claim to this revolutionary tradition seem curiously reluctant to centre their activities where the working class can still, despite the ravages of neoliberalism, be found – the workplace. Even the most stellar representatives of left agency, as we have seen, display a marked inclination to lead their troops away from that terrain and towards radical forms of ‘industrial democracy,’ ‘new social forces’, broader political issues etc. This aversion is reflected in the continuing assumption among many sections of the left that trade unionism – seen not only as ‘male, stale and pale’ but as fundamentally establishment-oriented – is one of the least likely forces for social transformation.”

[Sheila Cohen, “Left agency and class action: The paradox of workplace radicalism.” Capital & Class. Volume 35, number 3, October 2011. Pages 371-389.]

“The question concerning the condition and application of the contemporary State of Emergency is now at the centre of theoretical exploration across a range of specialities within the humanities and the critical social sciences, from sociology and political theory to literature, cultural, philosophical and international studies.…

“The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims. Nazi Germany’s Decrees of 1933 are, for instance, a first-rate illustration of the modern State of Emergency. The 28 February Decree, for example, was one of the most oppressive acts of the new Nazi administration. It authorized the suspension of civil liberties in the wake of the fictitious crisis produced by the Nazis as a consequence of the fire that wrecked the Reichstag parliament building on the preceding day. Now, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have not, of course, formally affirmed a contemporary State of Emergency in their governments. Yet, in this Introduction, I shall argue that the Bush and Blair regimes are certainly beginning to lay the foundations for the state and purposes of a ‘hypermodern’ State of Emergency ….

[John Armitage, “State of Emergency: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 19, number 4, 2002. Pages 27-38.]

“The constitutionalization of the state of emergency is the final piece in a process, specifically, the formal inscription in the Constitution of the elimination of the rule of law. It is the police system that then becomes the core of the national state. Yet it is crucial to note that this form of state does not retain any real independence even at this level. Of course, the prerogative of maintaining order remains within its purview, contrary to war, money, or economic policy. However, the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] directly organizes European police forces themselves. This ‘collaboration’ dates from the beginning of the 1980s and even at that time had the ‘fight against terrorism’ as its immediate pretext. Not only does the FBI organize the mixed intervention teams, but due to this ‘collaboration,’ it has also succeeded in strongly influencing European legislation both at the national and EU [European Union] levels.” [Jean-Claude Paye, “Sovereignty and the State of Emergency: France and the United States.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 8, January 2017. Pages 1-11.]

“For our part, and this won’t surprise anyone, it seems to us that the real danger doesn’t come from the Middle-East but from the successive governments that have plunged us into these dark waters and are attempting at present to close their trap on us once more. By getting us to go along with their war, they’re already speculating on the benefits they’ll draw from the next time we’ll be taken as targets. The attacks and the present state of emergency realize the dream of every government: that everyone will stay home – absolute privatization. It’s obviously the opposite that should be done: take the squares, meet in the streets, occupy the universities, directly debate the situation, find the right words for grasping our common condition, restore public space to its political calling, begin to organize and cease to leave our fate in the hands of the bloody imbeciles who claim to govern us. In this way we have some chance of becoming a crowd that holds together, and no longer that collection of anomic solitudes that’s unable to defend itself when it’s attacked – by its government or by jihadists.” [Hostis. Against the State of Emergency. Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 2016. Pages 2-3.]

“The attacks of September 11 forever ended the idea that the United States could somehow float above the rest of the earth, of it and not of it at the same time. Americans can no longer foster the illusion that what happens to the rest of the world doesn’t affect them. It is more crucial than ever that we understand what kind of world we are living in, and what the United States has done to make it what it is.

“It is not enough to say that the attacks were crimes against humanity, though they were, and that terrorism like that must be stopped, though it must. It’s also not enough to say that the hijackers were religious extremists, though they were.…

“It is of particular importance to understand its newest policies, the so-called ‘war on terrorism.’ Of the many ways to approach it, perhaps the most straightforward is to examine the official view of the war on terrorism that has emerged and is being pushed on the public, and refuting it point by point.”

[Rahul Mahajan, “The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 53, issue 9, February 2002. Pages 15-23.]

“Whereas human rights can now be envisaged as officially ‘universalized’ by the consensus of all states at the Vienna Conference, they look even more like contemporary transcultural values in the behavior or nongovernmental organizations. It is on the basis of the Universal Declaration and of the treaties and declarations that stem therefrom that all of these non-profit private entities with diverse origins—and they are also a worldwide phenomenon of our times—pursue their public aims, both in the area of individual rights and in defense of collective rights of specific groups and communities.” [José A. Lindgren Alves, “The Declaration of Human Rights in Postmodernity.” Human Rights Quarterly. Volume 22, number 2, May 2000. Pages 478-500.]

“Given our reservations for either a top-down or bottom-up approach separately, we feel that a different organization is appropriate, one that works with types of systems as alternative conceptual devices with equal status. We do not feel compelled to deal with a sequence of levels ordered by definitions that emphasize degrees of inclusiveness, although we use inclusivity when it is pertinent. The conventional ecological hierarchy is not wrong, but it is far too particular to serve as a framework for an undertaking as broad as we have in mind, a unified ecology. In unifying ecology we need to juxtapose levels and structures that come from distant places in the conventional order.

“This book offers a cohesive intellectual framework for ecology. We show how to link the various parts of ecology into a natural whole. The prevailing lack of unity that we address comes from ecologists resorting to telling stories about special cases instead of rigorously defining the general condition.…

“The body of ideas we use has been gaining credence in ecology for more than the last quarter of a century under the rubrics of hierarchy theory, patch dynamics, scale questions, general systems theory, multiple stable points, surprise, chaos, catastrophe, complexity, and self-organizing systems. Although computers are not always used in the application of all these ideas, the mind-set that they have in common came from computer-based modeling of complexity. These collective conceptions are sufficiently mature for us to pull them together, with some new material, into a cohesive theory for ecological systems in general. The first edition of this book is still up to date, but the places where ecology has moved forward are now included.”

[Timothy F. H. Allen and Thomas W. Hoekstra. Toward a Unified Ecology. Second edition. New York: Columbia University Press. 2015. Page 18.]

“In this article I focus on a tension which has emerged from recent attempts to theorize the meaning of human emancipation from the perspective of an ecologically reconstructed Marxism.…

“Culture … is an intrinsic component of human nature as such; and it is not possible to specify human nature in purely biological terms even in principle, for the human biological organism itself did not reach its final evolutionary form before the introduction of culture. The self-transformations made possible for humans in society, therefore, cannot be treated as derivations of underlying biological or psychological determinants, of an innate human nature ….”

[Tim Hayward, “Ecology and Human Emancipation.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 62, autumn 1992. Pages 3-13.]

“Deep ecology appears to be some elaboration of the position that natural things other than humans have value in themselves, value sometimes perhaps exceeding that of or had by humans.” [Richard Sylvan, “A Critique of Deep Ecology.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 40, summer 1985. Pages 2-12.]

“The critique of deep ecology has led to a different sort of position, tentatively entitled ‘deep-green theory.’ …

“A major difference between the theories lies in the distribution of values. Deep ecology, like simpler utilitarianism, offers a unique 1nitial distribution: each living thing is assigned equal value and nothing else has intrinsic value. Deep-green theory, whlle rejecting both the themes upon which this simplistic assignment depends, is much less specific as to how value is distributed.”

[Richard Sylvan, “A Critique of Deep Ecology.” Part II.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 41, autumn 1985. Pages 10-22.]

“Geo-Justice re-visions justice-making. In our time, cultural and ecclesial organizations strive to bring about justice for whales, for forests, for battered wives and abused children, for the poor, the victims of oppression… All these causes are worthy. Yet most of these efforts remain fragmented, isolated from each other.

“Liberation theology has helped us to recognize the poor and oppressed as a primary source of divine presence and revelation. Expanding that recognition, we can also begin to see in our new present history of cultural collapse and ecological devastation the oppressed Earth itself as a source of divine wisdom for our actions.…

“Justice with the earth will be a work of the heart—a falling in love with the divine source that summons us to become one with the beautiful and oppressed Earth.

“Geo-Justice will be more a participation than an obligation—more about love than laws, more about harmony than have-to’s. Geo-Justice extends the compassion of the heart into the psychic, society, and Earth. It is about healing ourselves, our systems, and our planet.

“Geo-Justice will liberate the poor, and liberate our poor Earth. It is a preferential option for the Earth.…

“Geo-Justice is an operative myth for our time.”

[James Conlon. Geo-Justice: A preferential option for the Earth. San Jose, California: Resource Publications, Inc. 1990. Pages 17-18.]

“The institutionalized bigotry and oppression we face today have not always existed. They arose with the division of society into exploiter and exploited. Divide-and-conquer tactics have allowed the slave-owners, feudal landlords and corporate ruling classes to keep for themselves the lion's share of wealth created by the laboring class.

“Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry toward transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies.

“Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other’s differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.

“The struggle against intolerable conditions is on the rise around the world. And the militant role of transgendered women, men and youths in today’s fightback movement is already helping to shape the future.”

[Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come—A Marxist view of when and why transgender oppression arose. New York: World View Forum. 1992. Page 12.]

“[Friedrich] Engels, Karl Marx’s leading collaborator in developing the doctrine scientific socialism, found that … [some] ancient societies showed no evidence of a state apparatus of repression, large-scale warfare, slavery or the nuclear family. Engels and Marx saw [Lewis Henry] Morgan’s studies as further proof that the modern-day oppression of women was rooted in the cleavage of society into classes based on private ownership of property. The fact that oppression was not a feature of early communal societies lent great weight to their prognosis that overturning private ownership in favor of socialized property would lay the basis for revolutionizing human relations.” [Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come—A Marxist view of when and why transgender oppression arose. New York: World View Forum. 1992. Page 9.]

“In recent years, critical understandings of race have garnished greater acceptance within the social sciences.…

“In this article, the term critical understandings of race (CUR) is used to denote the broad intellectual movement that applies critical approaches to issues of race and racial inequality. CUR are rooted in legal storytelling and borrow heavily from the critical theories developed in radical feminism; they also rely on the critical perspectives found in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Jaques Derrida, and W.E.B. Du Bois …. Critical race theory and critical white studies are the most formalized versions of the perspective ….

“Critical understandings of race value activist research and share a progressive political ideology rooted in radical multiculturalism …. They seek ‘not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better’ ….”

[Robert M. Anthony, “A Challenge to Critical Understandings of Race.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 42, issue 3, 2012. Pages 260-281.]

“Modernity and postmodernity have formed an important framework for debate in sociological theory. The often confrontational nature of the debate has obscured key conclusions but these can be outlined by considering an argument often used by modernists against postmodernists, called the self-refuting paradox. This argument takes the form ‘the claim that there is no such thing as the Rational is itself a rational claim and so refutes itself.’ …

“… The need for arguments about the nature of norms and the effects of the absolutely negative norm emerges from the assertion of the self-refuting paradox, not the confirmation of either modernity or postmodernity.”

[Tim Jordan, “The self-refuting paradox and the conditions of sociological thought.” The Sociological Review. Volume 45, issue 3, August 1997. Pages 488–511.]

“I want to argue here for a two-fold claim: although the interpretive and pragmatic turn is right in criticizing the idea of a break between the objective standpoint of critique and the deluded perspective of the agents, it does not follow that we have to abandon the project of a critique of ideology. However, the status of that critique will change significantly in the new picture, since the social theory of critique I outline here reconstructs the normative distinctions and theorems of the critique of ideology as constantly being invoked and interpreted, made and remade by agents themselves in the realm of social practice.…

“The aim of this social theory of critique, as I am presenting it here, is not a dismissal of the critique of ideology as in the hermeneutic and ethnological cases, but a reconstruction of its distinctions and theorems as constantly being invoked and interpreted, made and remade in the realm of social practices.”

[Robin Celikates, “From Critical Social Theory to a Social Theory of Critique: On the Critique of Ideology after the Pragmatic Turn.” Constellations. Volume 13, number 1, 2006. Pages 21-40.]

“Social work practice is distinguished by its attention to social and economic power relations and the resulting competing ‘rights’ that impact at personal, cultural and institutional levels …. As such, it is well placed to cut across any tendency for reproductive practice to operate in disciplinary silos with restricted regard to political and social awareness and the interconnectedness of interests and rights. Social work’s contextual understanding can deepen knowledge of the experiences of those affected by adoption, donor conception and surrogacy (including in private and public law) and the development of policies that shape associated practices in the commercial sphere ….

“However, social work practice in this area [assisted reproduction] is patchy both within and across countries. The social work literature often skirts around contentious issues, perhaps impeded by the multiple perspectives located in work with families and the well-being of children, the impact on their disciplinary confidence and status from being singled out for severe public criticism when child protection goes wrong and when their ‘intrusion’ into the private realm of the family is challenged. Social work has long been affected by the political environment in which it operates and the time when its influence wanes is arguably when it is most needed …. The increasing dominance of ideological and commercial positions that reflect a global shift towards prioritising the right to parent by the relatively affluent may be such a time ….”

[Patricia Fronek and Marilyn Crawshaw, “The ‘New Family’ as an Emerging Norm: A Commentary on the Position of Social Work in Assisted Reproduction.” British Journal of Social Work. Volume 45, number 2, 2015. Pages 737-746.]

“… we started to be influenced by the Frankfurt School, not so much with the earlier generation of people like [Theodor] Adorno or [Max] Horkheimer, but with the new generation of the Frankfurt School like [Jürgen] Habermas.…

“I was more in the reformist tradition but had some connections to people in the radical camp. We regarded social work as a human rights tradition, and therefore we emphasized social help and social support. In this context, the lifeworld orientation was very important because it argued that we need to start with the problems and the needs of the people and their own interpretation of their situation in their own situation. We were influenced by people like Siegfried Bernfeld, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, and by theories about everyday life like the ones proposed by Erving Goffman, Alfred Schütz, [Peter] Berger and [Thomas] Luckmann, Habermas and [Karel] Kosík.…

[Hans Thiersch in Daniel Schugurensky, “Social Pedagogy and Critical Theory: A Conversation with Hans Thiersch.” The International Journal of Social Pedagogy. Volume 3, number 4, 2014. Pages 4-14.]

“The term ‘lifeworld orientation’, here used as a synonym for ‘everyday orientation,’ describes a conceptual framework for … social work and social care. The concept of the lifeworld orientation was established in the 1970s, and can currently be seen as one of the dominant practice and theory models in Germany.…

“The concept of the lifeworld orientation for social work and social care developed at the intersection of these trends [radical social criticism and a focus on everyday experiences]. It assimilated these critiques, and addressed them with the medium of the lifeworld experience of both service users and practitioners. The concept may be defined politically, but stops short of being a totalising social critique. It is located in the space defined by the conflicts between coercion and freedom, between oppression and emancipation, and by the corresponding contradiction between criticism and action, in the knowledge that these conflicts cannot simply be resolved. The concept presupposes that there is a societal need for professional social work and social care. It applies lifeworld experience, and takes account of what support is required, to develop practice concepts — concepts reflecting a permanently awkward tension between the dangers of organisational self-referential arrogance and the benefits of specific opportunities for methodologically transparent and reliable work ….”

[Klaus Grunwald and Hans Thiersch, “The Concept of the ‘Lifeworld Orientation’ for Social Work and Social Care.” Journal of Social Work Practice. Volume 23, number 2, June 2009. Pages 131-146.]

“Over the past two decades perhaps no pedagogical practice has so quickly and broadly changed the dynamics of the US college classroom as service learning. Also known as service-learning (there’s much debate about the hyphen), community service learning, academic service learning, or sometimes more broadly as civic engagement, college educators—and now even many high school teachers feel the pressure to engage their students in the life of the community. The service learning movement has pushed colleges out of their ivory towers and into the community, but the insertion of power, money, and often well-to-do students into community life raises a number of ethical challenges.…

“I want to know how professors who engage in radical pedagogies, like service learning, can prepare themselves and their students for the ethical challenges such pedagogies introduce into the classroom. How do we think through, for example, the shift in power dynamics between professors and students, the paternalistic overtones often carried by students out into the community, or the brief nature of semester-based service efforts? Like most service learning practitioners, I first turned to John Dewey for answers because he is the recognized intellectual father of the service learning tradition.”

[Joe Blosser, “Beyond Moral Development: Re-theorizing Ethical Practices in Service Learning.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Volume 12, number 2, spring 2012. Open access. Pages 196-214.]

“Turning to work in contemporary critical theory, which associates strident anti-humanism in social theory with the rise of neoliberal discourse, I argue that sustained attention to the ways in which personal and social history always entail one another and are mutually arising makes not only for better phenomenology but makes for better critical scholarship as well.…

“… An existential archeology of contemporary postindustrial ‘workplace spirituality’ will track the contours of the neo-hegemonic discourse, on the one hand, and will also exploit the spaces of contradiction wherein biographical history simultaneously reproduces and resists—both as a voluntary matter or not—identification with this discourse, on the other hand. As a type of practice theory which self-reflexively aims to bridge existentialist and poststructuralist insights, it specializes in the investigation of the ways in which the discursive rules that constitute knowledge across multiple social institutions are reproduced at the level of intersubjective history.…

“In contrast to the Foucauldian collapse of the distinction between technologies of self and domination occasioned by the artificial removal of the ‘contradictions of socialization under the antagonistic conditions of neoliberal capitalism,’ … an existential archeology of contemporary ‘workplace spirituality’ gives voice to these tensions and gains critical leverage in doing so.”

[George González, “Towards an Existential Archeology of Capitalist Spirituality.” Religions. Volume 7, issue 7, June 2016. Pages 1-22.]

“… the advocacy of neurodiversity … [is] a type of autism pride that posits ASD [Autism spectrum disorder] as naturally occurring, and even positive, neuro-variations in human cognitive wiring that should be celebrated rather than eliminated. The neurodiversity approach sees ASD as a disabilitand accordingly takes a disability rights approach. Neurodiversity advocates explain that ‘supports for autistic people should be aimed at helping them to compensate, navigate, and function in the world, not at changing them into non-autistic people or isolating them from the world ….

“Although coinage of the term neurodiversity has been credited to Judy Singer …, others point to Jim Sinclair’s 1993 speech ‘‘Don’t Mourn for Us’’— which addresses parents of autistic children and expresses hurt at attempts to change individuals with ASD—as the starting point of the ‘‘movement’’ ….”

[M. Ariel Cascio, “Neurodiversity: Autism Pride Among Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Volume 50, number 3, June 2012. Pages 273-283.]

“You didn’t lose a child to autism. You lost a child because the child you waited for never came into existence. That isn’t the fault of the autistic child who does exist, and it shouldn’t be our burden. We need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived. Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams. But don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.” [Jim Sinclair, “Don’t Mourn for Us.” Autonomy: The Critical Journal of Interdisciplinary Autism Studies. Volume 1, number 1, October 2012. Pages 1-4.]

“… [The] critical cultural approach, which I am calling ‘Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis’ (CTDA), combines analyses of information technology material and virtual design with an inquiry into the production of meaning through information technology practice and the articulations of information technology users in situ. CTDA offers the opportunity to think about all three in parallel, using a conceptual framework interrogating power relations, in order to tease out the connections between them. This approach provides a holistic analysis of the interactions between technology, cultural ideology, and technology practice.

“CTDA is designed to be open to any critical cultural theoretical framework, as long as the same critical cultural approach is applied to the semiotics of the information and communication technology (ICT) hardware and software under examination and the discourses of its users.”

[André Brock, “Critical technocultural discourse analysis.” New Media & Society. OnlineFirst edition. November, 2016. Pages 1-19.]

“… the discourse analysis explores two competing discourses: a reformist and a radical. The reformist discourse underlines a goal of (political) representation expressed in Empowerment. It may be understood as an important part of producing a legitimate autistic political subject–positioned as a full member, with a full membership–within a parent-dominated autistic advocacy movement. The reformist discourse can be viewed as a result of a negotiation, where full membership is conditioned on the parents’ terms and granted on specific terms. These include working together (neuro-inclusively), advocacy based on interest rather than identity/position as a specific target/member group, agreement upon a definition of autism as a disability (a deficit) a person has rather than an identity. In relation to this, an alternative legitimate autistic subject is produced through invoking the counter-hegemonic radical discourse. Such a narrative produces the ‘Asperger’ or ‘Aspie.’ Here, the ‘full membership’ refers to a sense of identification with sense of belonging to and being at home with other people with autism. It contains a certain amount of autistic solidarity within the group of adults with autism.…

“The analysis reports two competing discourses: an integrationist (or reformist) and a separatist discourse. They are producing two quite different subject positions and by implication different forms of collective action/activity. Through the more integrationist discourse a subject position as a person with autism is produced and through a counterhegemonic radical discourse a subject position of the ‘Aspie’ is produced. The integrationist discourse underlines a goal of incorporating people with autism into the social/NT world. Hence action is focused on (political) representation through activities such as increased influence and involvement in the association through board representation and formal representation on boards.”

[Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Charlotte Brownlow, and Lindsay O’Dell, “‘An Association for All’—Notions of the Meaning of Autistic Self-Advocacy Politics within a Parent-Dominated Autistic Movement.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Volume 25, number 3, May 2015. Pages 219-231.]

“In spite of himself, [Talcott] Parsons shows us a way back to a series of crucial categories needed for the coherence of critical social theory. I would like to point to three different but interrelated concepts which we can see as crucial for anchoring a critical social theory/social science. First, there is a overcoming of the thin, utilitarian conception of social actors and their deep embedding within social systems. This does not mean, as with [Niklas] Luhmann, that agency is eclipsed by social context, it means that modernity places a particularly strong weight on the formation of individual agency. Second, there is the importance of seeing the personality as in tension with his social environment. What was missing in critical theory from the beginning was a cohesive theoretical paradigm that could explain the symmetry between the institutional power dynamics of capitalist institutional logics and the internalized obedience to these systems on the part of the subject. By blending [Karl] Marx, [Sigmund] Freud, and [Max] Weber, critical theory attempted to weld together these different theoretical paradigms in order to explain the crucial problem of the erosion of critical thought and its ability to confront the colonization of society, culture, and consciousness by the capitalist logic of valorization. Although Parsons cannot be seen as attempting this from his own theoretical vantage point, there is little question that he was able to achieve a highly integrated and cohesive theoretical understanding of this precise problem. In this sense, the relevance of Parsons needs to be seen in the extent to which the mechanisms he points to are able to help us come to grips with the further expansion and deepening of these forms of thought that persist in modern society.” [Michael J. Thompson, “Talcott Parsons and the Logic of Critical Social Theory.” Situations. Volume 4, number 2, 2011. Pages 141-168.]

“The pedagogy of service-learning, combined with the reflection log in this paper, illustrates the critical social theory expectations of quality learning that teach students to think critically: Ideology critique and utopian critique …. The data highlight how the students critique and read their world, and imagine how they could contribute to a better world in their work as a teacher. Further to this knowledge transformation, the students demonstrated an enhanced understanding about inclusive education and the students were able to reconstruct their own vision of what their future role as a teacher could be. This enabled them to consider their roles as activists and change agents in the teaching profession. The reflection process … facilitated the students to see the links between their acts of service, their university study and their view of the world ….” [Suzanne Carrington and Gitta Selva, “Critical social theory and transformative learning: Evidence in pre-service teachers’ service-learning reflection logs.” Higher Education Research and Development. Volume 29, number 1, February 2010. Pages 45-57.]

“… the development of a pedagogy of revolution by the LRBW [League of Revolutionary Black Workers] as a means to address the exploitation, oppression, and racism that they encountered in their objective material conditions will be addressed. In identifying a pedagogy of revolution as understood and developed by the LRBW an attempt is made to draw distinctions between theoretical, organizational, and political development. There is much overlap between these divisions as they develop dialectically with each other. This analysis of the data focuses on the intellectual process (theoretical development), although these three processes are reflexive and inform each other. Additionally theoretical development of pedagogy is explored as a process of historical development: from their inception around 1967 to the split in 1971, from the split in 1971 to their dissolution in 1973, and from their dissolution in 1973 to post LRBW.” [Anthony Barnum, “Identifying the Theoretical Development of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers for a Pedagogy of Revolution.” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice. Number 21, 2014. Pages 1-28.]

“… it is not sufficient to merely assist or more passively ‘allow’ the person who is challenged to identify, design, construct and maintain their own means – mechanical or otherwise – of managing disabling space. A responsible, relational approach to accommodating complex sensory impairments takes steps to bring about change, steps that begin with a geographical imagination.…

“Space for genuine difference and diversity is crucial for those on the spectrum, and future research is required to advance the project ASD [Autism spectrum disorder] authors themselves have begun. Such studies might further imagine what relational approaches respectful of difference might look like. They might also explore how mutually ‘inclusive’ societies could re-conceptualize real difference in terms other than deviancy or deficit ….”

[Joyce Davidson, “‘It cuts both ways’: A relational approach to access and accommodation for autism.” Social Science & Medicine. Volume 70, issue 2, January 2010. Pages 305-312.]

“If oppression and emancipation are the two main concerns of CST [critical social theory], then its transformative knowledge base should also reflect their full and lived complexity. For answers are only as deep as the questions that educators and students are able to pose. In this sense, quality education is not something that teachers provide through CST. Rather, quality education is the product of a struggle during the pedagogical interaction where both teacher and student play the role of critic. If criticism is done appropriately and authentically, then educators put theory in its proper place within the process of education.” [Zeus Leonardo, “Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge: The Functions of Criticism in Quality Education.” Educational Researcher. Volume 33, number 6. Pages 11-18.]

“The project of critical theory rests on the conviction that the humanities and human sciences must be emancipatory in order to resist becoming ideological instruments of a post-Enlightenment state. Whether or not they give any overt recognition to the work of the Frankfurt school, such movements within cultural theory as feminism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and studies of racism share its epistemological politics. However, as these various longitudinal movements within cultural studies proceed to demonstrate a presiding sexism, colonialism, enthnocentrism, or racism within the various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, each in turn promotes its critical project as the most effective or legitimately universal means of exposing a methodological Eurocentrism at work in the production of knowledge.” [Michael Payne, “Introduction: Some Versions of Cultural and Critical Theory (1996).” A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. Second edition. Michael Payne and Jessica Rae Barbera, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 2010. Pages 1-11.]

“This article examines the linguistic processes through which a projected event (that is, an event that a group of spokespersons alleges will occur in the future) is constructed within factual discourse. Critical linguistic analysis is used to examine the New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the 1990 Persian Gulf conflict. This study makes two contributions. First, it expands on work in critical linguistics by explicating how a projected event is constructed as a discrete and autonomous event unfolding in the social world. Second, this study demonstrates how the political interests underlying the newspaper accounts were ‘naturalized’ through linguistic transformations that constructed politically situated assertions as unmediated and presupposed information. This study is important for understanding the constructive nature of language practices because it demonstrates how seemingly arhetorical linguistic constructions can be examined for their rhetorical features, features that play an important role in actively constructing representations of the social world.” [Patricia L. Dunmire, “Naturalizing the Future in Factual Discourse: A Critical Linguistic Analysis of a Projected Event.” Written Communication. volume 14, number 2, April 1997. Pages 221-264.]

“What … researchers working within the critical linguistic paradigm share is a common vision of the centrality of language as a means of sustaining and reproducing power structures in society. One fundamental theoretical idea that informs ‘critical linguistics’ is the belief that social relations of power are discursively enacted and reproduced …, and therefore by analysing discursive structures, social processes and structures can be uncovered and elucidated to reveal the ideologies that may be at work beneath language. Ideology, in this context, can be defined as ‘particular ways of representing and constructing society which reproduce unequal relations of power, relations of domination and exploitation’ ….” [Peter Teo, “Mandarinising Singapore: a Critical Analysis of Slogans in Singapore’s ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign.’” Working paper number 120. Centre for Language in Social Life of Lancaster University. Bailrigg, England. Pages i-ii and 1-37.]

“Approaches to critical linguistics have identified several dimensions of relationships among language, ideology, and power. Critical linguistic analysis aims at uncovering the role of language in constructing social identities, relationships, issues, and events. Its central concern has been to examine the socio-political nature of the texts and discourses through which social reality is constituted and investigate how these discourses maintain power through their ideological properties ….” [Su Jung Min, “Constructing Ideology: A Critical Linguistic Analysis.” Studies in the Linguistic Sciences. Volume 27, number 2, fall 1997. Pages 147-164.]

“Just as everyday discussions and debates shift constantly between different levels of abstraction, legal discourse also shifts constantly between different levels of abstraction. A critical linguistic analysis of law is an analysis that focuses on being conscious of how courts and lawyers uses linguistic techniques to subtly change the subject matter of a legal discussion, and of how such linguistic moves have both substantive and rhetorical effect on shaping legal discourse.” [Reginald C. Oh, “Vision and Revision: Exploring the History, Evolution, and Future of the Fourteenth Amendment: A Critical Linguistic Analysis of Equal Protection Doctrine: Are Whites a Suspect Class?” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review. Volume 13, 2004. Pages 583-610.]

“The linguistic features and the correlated function mappings used in the analysis are established in the literature of functional/critical linguistics. In particular, I included linguistic forms which signal the different kinds of meaning carried by the ideational, interpersonal, and textual semantic components.” [Sevasti Kessapidu, “A critical linguistic approach to a corpus of business letters in Greek.” Discourse & Society. Volume 8, number 4, 1997. Pages 479-500.]

“In critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis, focus is put on often detailed linguistic characteristics, which are assumed to reflect or reproduce the social context in which they were produced. A common critique within critical discourse analysis is, however, that research in the field often lacks focus on either the language or the social context ….” [Elin Lövestam. Dietetic documentation: Content, language and the meaning of standardization in Swedish dietitians’ patient record notes. Ph.D. dissertation. Uppsala University. Uppsala, Sweden. 2015. Page 67.]

“Discourse analysis may take many forms, and there are no agreed analytic procedures, although guidelines are available.…

“… [These include] critical discourse analysis, interpretive structurism, critical linguistic analysis, and social linguistic analysis ….”

[Margaret O’Connor, “Discourse analysis: examining the potential for research in palliative care.” Palliative Medicine. Volume 20, number 8, December 2006. Pages 829-834.]

“In its first sense, ideology refers to a systematically distorted or false picture of reality, one that benefits one group’s interests over another’s. To paraphrase [Theodor] Adorno …, ideology serves as a veil used by those in power to conceal their real interests and advantages: Ruling ideas veil the interests of materially dominant groups ….

“Ideology also has a second meaning. If the first meaning is coordinated with a false consciousness, the second speaks of something as ideological when it accurately represents the consciousness of a group or an epoch, Ideology reflects a particular sociohistorical context and in this sense is a true consciousness as well. To gain access to the subjective world view of individuals, therefore, is to gain access to an accurate portrait of their experiences of their society as mirrored in their thought forms.

“These two faces of ideology paradoxically suggest that something ideological is both true and false at the same time. It is true insofar as it accurately represents the reality of a given sociohistorical era or group. It is false insofar as that truth may itself be a systematic distortion which serves the interests of some groups over others.…

“… By examining ideology we accomplish two goals: We expand our understanding of cognitivism by uncovering and undoing its dual reductions, and we reveal the ideological bases of the cognitivist perspective itself—the values, interests, and underlying social practices that its emphasis serves.”

[Edward E. Sampson, “Cognitive Psychology as Ideology.” American Psychologist. Volume 36, number 7, July 1981. Pages 730-743.]

“The case study, ‘critical pedagogy’, … it represents an alternative applied linguistics, known as critical applied linguistics (CAL). It does this in two ways, first by offering a critique of traditional applied linguistics …; and second, by exemplifying one way of doing CAL, namely critical pedagogy. I shall suggest … that CAL may represent an ethical response to traditional applied linguistics; then … I look more closely at the origins of CAL and the claims it makes.” [Alan Davies. An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory. Second edition. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. Page 17.]

“Critical applied linguistics (CAL) brings into applied linguistics a postmodern view of knowledge and of the ways in which it is socially constructed …. CAL rejects all grand theories of language in use such as the inevitability of English as a world language, proffering ‘scepticism towards all metanarratives’ …. It outs traditional applied linguistics as an enterprise which is hegemonic and has never been neutral ….” [Alan Davies. An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory. Second edition. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. Page 128.]

“… CAL [critical applied linguistics] would offer what might be regarded as an idealistic ethical view, taking no account either of the availability of resources or of the social facts of for example the position in the world (in India, or in Australia) of English. And so in spite of its claims to be socially concerned, CAL appears to be individually oriented. This puts a question mark against its role within applied linguistics as it has been practised, since that practice has always been socially aware, context sensitive, attempting to bring together what is known about language and local realities. CAL looks much more like the abstraction we expect in theoretical linguistics. But of course the bottom line of CAL is that it does raise the fundamental question within applied linguistics, which is whether its traditional practice has in fact been misguided.” [Alan Davies. An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory. Second edition. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. Page 130.]

“It might be tempting to consider critical applied linguistics as an amalgam of related critical domains. From this point of view, critical applied linguistics would either be made up of, or constitute the intersection of, areas such as critical linguistics, critical discourse analysis, critical language awareness, critical pedagogy, critical sociolinguistics, and critical literacy. But such a formulation is unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, the coverage of such domains is rather different from that of critical applied linguistics; critical pedagogy, for example, is used broadly across many areas of education. Second, there are many other domains – feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, to name but a few – that do not operate under an explicit critical label but which clearly have a great deal of importance for the area. Third, it seems more constructive to view critical applied linguistics not merely as an amalgam of different parts, a piece of bricolage, or a meta-category of critical work, but rather in more dynamic and productive terms. And finally, crucially, part of developing critical applied linguistics is developing a critical stance toward other areas of work, including other critical domains. Critical applied linguistics may borrow and use work from these other areas, but it should certainly only do so critically.” [Alastair Pennycook, “Critical Applied Linguistics.” The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Alan Davies and Catherine Elder, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004. Pages 784-807.]

“Drawing on work in areas such as feminism, antiracism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, or queer theory, this approach to the critical seeks not so much the stable ground of an alternative truth but rather the constant questioning of all categories. From this point of view, critical applied linguistics is not only about relating micro relations of applied linguistics to macro relations of social and political power; neither is it only concerned with relating such questions to a prior critical analysis of inequality; rather, it is also concerned with questioning what is meant by and what is maintained by many of the everyday categories of applied linguistics: language, learning, communication, difference, context, text, culture, meaning, translation, writing, literacy, assessment, and so on.” [Alastair Pennycook. Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Page 21.]

“I agree with [Alastair] Pennycook who suggests that critical applied linguists need to be aware of their limits of knowing. Despite the limits, in order that CAL is more down-to-earth to EFL [English as a foreign language] pedagogy in Indonesia, I propose a working model (the “discursive mapping”) with these purposes.… [I]t is to engage teachers and students with difference. That is, they need to acknowledge that language teaching and learning does not exist in social vacuum and hence different voices that contribute to confusion syndrome Discourses should be addressed. By so doing, it is hoped that both teachers and students learn to suspend judgment to politicians. Teachers and students may critique politicians’ language use but at least by being engaged with difference (e.g. putting oneself in someone’s shoes), they become more aware of the complexity politicians have to deal with, e.g. conflicts of interests, clashes of worldviews, and ignorance about a certain law that leads them to produce regulations that are not only against the law but make people confused.” [Joseph Ernest Mambu, “Addressing Political ‘Confusion Syndrome’ Discourses: A Critical Applied Linguistics Perspective.” K@ta. Volume 10, number 1, June 2008. Pages 14-35.]

“The article … discusses FL [foreign language] teacher education and research in light of various criticisms that have been levelled at it and introduces the additional perspective of critical applied linguistics, which, I argue, may help to rectify some of the problems.…

“… I join many others in both applied linguistics and mainstream education, particularly those engaged in forms of critical pedagogy, who believe that there are grounds for grave concern when we consider the factors influencing S/FL [second and foreign language] teachers and teaching in many parts of the world.”

[Graham Crookes, “What Influences What and How Second and Foreign Language Teachers Teach?” The Modern Language Journal. Volume 81, number 1, spring 1997. Pages 67-79.]

“… [There] was a movement across structuralism (in the sense of a correction and modernization of the ideas of the Enlightenment), rejecting the subjective existentialism and psychoanalysis in favor of a quest for the objective in the patterning of social life …, to poststructuralism, rejecting the scientific aspirations of structuralism, and asserting that there is no truth and so there can be no appropriate methodology, and so demonstrating the ancient clash between nominalism and realism. The result of this intellectual shift lies in the identification of the political, but with the following problem: Does the shift reveal the quest of a just politics or the quest for just a politics? This question resulted in a development that led to what might be termed critical applied linguistics.” [Robert Kaplan, “Practice without Theory and Theory without Practice.” TESOL Quarterly. Volume 42, number 2, June 2008. Pages 294-296.]

“… a broad definition of language has been adopted to refer to not only language per se but also its performance (competence) and strategic manipulation and tacit ground rules in social communication. This broad working definition, unconventional as it may seem to linguists, will provide a useful conceptual framework for articulating the multilayered power dynamics of language and its use. Because discrimination heavily implicates the use and abuse of power, research in this area will benefit from a critical appreciation of language power in both its banal and hidden forms. Toward this end, we will adopt a social psychology of language perspective … informed by works on the relationships between language and power … and between language and cognition ….” [Sik Hung Ng, “Language-Based Discrimination: Blatant and Subtle Forms.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology. Volume 26, number 2, June 2007. Pages 106-122.]

“[Samuel P.] Huntington’s diagnosis has given as much comfort to conservatives at home as it has to those proclaiming their cultural peculiarity abroad. For all its resonance, however, the argument is not only false, but also ugly and pernicious. As his liberal critics have noted, Huntington’s argument is false because cultures are not unified, closed totalities centred upon univocal religious doctrines, but are rather multiform, open and contested – subject to interpretation and contestation in relation to different interests and contexts.…

“More importantly, however, Huntington’s schema of a bipolar world characterized by ideological division being replaced by a multi-polar civilizational order is radically insufficient to make sense of the contours of contemporary global politics.…

“… Huntington presents multiculturalism within the West (particularly in the United States) as an attempt to reject the West’s cultural heritage and to overthrow its liberal political arrangements. A more convincing interpretation, one more ready to engage with these new voices in the spirit of liberal tolerance and negotiation, would see them as attempts to expand and develop the freedoms of Western societies to incorporate all, and not just their White, people.”

[Simon Bromley, “Culture clash.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 85, September/October 1997. Pages 2-6.]

“It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” [Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs. Volume 72, number 3, summer 1993. Pages 22-49.]

“Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale. In the emerging world, states i and groups from two different civilizations may form limited, ad hoc, tactical connections and coalitions to advance their interests against entities from a third civilization or for other shared purposes. Relations between groups from different civilizations however will be almost never close, usually cool, and often hostile. Connections between states of different civilizations inherited from the past, such as Cold War military alliances, are likely to attenuate or evaporate. Hopes for close intercivilizational ‘partnerships,’ such as were once articulated by their leaders for Russia and America, will not be realized. Emerging intercivilizational relations will normally vary from distant to violent, with most falling somewhere in between.” [Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1996. Page 207.]

“‘The Clash of Civilizations’ has it weakness in three methodological dimensions, discipline, approach and correlative propositions. Discipline-wise, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ delineates a confusional mode of analysis ….

“Approach-wise, the article has two weaknesses. The first one is confusion in dealing with realist theory of international relations. [Samuel P.] Huntington’s aim is to produce a piece of international politics but he is inconsistent with the realist approach when he deals with world power politics. However, he does not stay in this line of thought when he identifies civilizational affinity as the base for alliances rather than national interest.

“The second deficiency with respect to approach in Huntington’s article relates to the unmanageability to its unit of analysis. Civilization as a unit of analysis is a big entity.…

“The third methodological weak point needs to be examined the correlative propositions. The key point in his analysis is that the future conflicts are keenly correlated with civilizational differences.”

[Mian Muhammad Tahir Ashraf, “The Clash of Civilizations? A Critique.” Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences (PJSS). Volume 32, number 2, 2012. Pages 521-527.]

“… there is the issue of the book’s title. It owes something to the notion of [Samuel P.] Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations,’ but the arguments made in this book are in no way derived from his simplistic analysis. There may however be some parallel between reading his work, less as sober analysis and more as political project designed to become self-fulfilling prophecy, and the political project known as globalisation.” [Ray Kiely. The Clash of Globalisations: Neo-Liberalism, the Third Way and Anti-Globalisation. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2005. Page 9.]

“Two closely related questions are briefly re-addressed: first, what do we mean by globalisation? Second, what changes have occurred in recent years, and what are the implications of these changes for contemporary politics? The first question, therefore, returns to questions related to the different usages of the term globalisation, while the second brings us back to the question of politics, and thus the ‘clash of globalisations.’ In addressing the first question, globalisation will be examined in terms of process, project and outcome. The second question will then draw on this discussion, to re-examine once again the nature of ‘anti-globalisation’ politics.” [Ray Kiely. The Clash of Globalisations: Neo-Liberalism, the Third Way and Anti-Globalisation. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2005. Page 292.]

“… emotions exist on the levels of brain and body, mind, and society. This book presents such a three-level theory, affect-spectrum theory, which makes possible prediction of the entire spectrum of the emotions – ranging from eight primary emotions, to 28 secondary emotions, to a potential 56 tertiary emotions. This theory will be developed as far as space allows, and it will, at least for its first eight propositions – in which eight primary emotions are predicted from each of the eight elementary social relations – be tested empirically using textual data in two radically different cultures, Australian Aborigines and Euro-Australians.” [Warren D. TenHouten. A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page xii.]

“The results of the study are strongly supportive of affect-spectrum theory with one problematic result: the negative experience of marketbased social relationships predicted Surprise significantly for Aborigines, but only directionally for Euro-Australians. The impossibility of estimating inter-indicator reliability for the six measures of MP [market pricing]—suggest it is not a unitary concept, and in fact it was determined that its six items are of two different kinds. Four of the items – measures of ejection, relinquishment, dislocation, and circumscription – get at the shared cultural experience of Aborigines, who have historically had the collective experience of having been conquered and disposed; forcibly taken off their lands, rounded up, and placed in reserves, mission, other institutions, and private homes; ejected from their sacred lands, thereby losing their nomadic way of life with its hunting-and-gathering mode of economic production; experienced having their families broken up and their children taken away; and in countless other ways have had their lives and identities circumscribed ….” [Warren D. TenHouten. A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 253.]

“There is a … position, which … I will … call ‘racial reconstructionism,’ that is … tenable. As understood here, reconstructionism is a substitutionist view, not an eliminativist view, and according to substitutionism we should replace racial discourse with a nearby discourse, with attendant proximate concepts and conceptions. According to my particular reconstructionist brand of substitutionism, that replacement should go as follows.

“First, we should keep the word ‘race’ and cognate and related terms. It might be less misleading if we used some other terms, like ‘shmace,’ but the best part of conservationism cautions us against making less than maximally efficient modifications to our language. Second, we should, at least for the time being, keep the exact racial groupings we have now, and if we have good reason perhaps eventually move to some other (possibly more coherent) set of groupings. So we will still talk about things we call ‘races,’ and we’ll have groups whose members we call ‘black people,’ ‘white people,’ ‘Asian people,’ and so on. Third, however, there will be one key difference that separates current racial discourse from post-reconstruction discourse: by ‘race’ we will, postreconstruction, intend only to refer to social kinds, and we will get rid of any conceptual implication that there are even partially biological races. That is racial reconstructionism ….”

[Joshua Glasgow. A Theory of Race. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Page 139.]

“Granted, in my preliminary effort to articulate a form of integral philosophy that is as realistic as it is idealistic and as fallibilistic as it is humanistic, with a pragmatic focus on the way people can, should, and already do act in the world, my contribution may be little more than a clarification of my own novel vision of the nexus between [Jürgen] Habermas’s critical theory, [Ken] Wilber’s integral theory, and [Chris] Argyris’s action science. Nevertheless, the logic of this vision and its demonstrated capacity to reconstruct established views within these fields should justify the effort required of you, the reader. More to the point, the real promise of the critical integralism I call Awareness-in-Action is in its potential to (re)define the common core of all the various forms and fields of human action, so that those of us concerned with such matters might learn how to respond more effectively to the interdependent political, economic, social, and ecological challenges of our time.” [Daniel J. O’Connor. Awareness-in-Action: A Critical Integralism for the Challenges of Our Time. Bainbridge Island, Washington: Reconstructive Realizations. 2015. Pages 2-3.]

“The precursors to what I call integral critical theory are found much closer to our times. In his early essays from the 1930s, Herbert Marcuse attempted to integrate the existential ontology of Martin Heidegger with the newly discovered humanistic perspective of the young Karl Marx. That attempt, initiated while Marcuse was writing his second doctorate under Heidegger, was cut short by the rise of Nazism. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research on its flight into exile and never resumed the project of phenomenological Marxism. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Jean-Paul Sartre embarked upon a major effort to link in a single philosophical space of theory the existential (personal) together with the sociopolitical (public) perspectives on human development.…

“One field of ICT [integral critical theory] pertains to material needs and resources for their satisfaction. Its corresponding dimension encompasses critique of political economy, whereby it articulates vehicles for just economic distribution of material resources for the satisfaction of bodily needs. Another field concerns social and cultural needs for recognition and institutions for their expression. This dimension of ICT develops critique of society, whereby it seeks political vehicles for social integration, democratic participation, and cultural reproduction. The third field articulates ultimate concerns or hope—spiritual needs for the self-transformation. The dimension of spiritual critique in this field is to unmask not only the secular but also the religious idolatry of finite absolutes. In this triple approach, an ICT would promote ways of human self-transformation, practices aiming at spiritual liberation, and communicative channels to redemptive hope.…

“There is one astonishing implication of taking steps in the direction of ICT [integral critical theory]: What we are suffering in the twenty-first century is neither solely an economic class war, nor Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations, e.g., between modern West and traditionalist Islam, nor simply religious wars. The revolutionary subject of true human needs, critique, and hoped-for ideals is not to be sought along one single trajectory: either economic or political class or orthodox religious brand-names. ICT requires us to rethink the fault lines of conflict as collisions of frameworks among material, political, and spiritual levels of development. Such collisions arise both from disturbances within the frameworks and in hegemonic struggles among them. The economic analysts need to focus on models best suited to local and global justice.”

[Martin Beck Matuštík, “Towards an Integral Critical Theory of the Present Age.” Integral Review. Creative Commons. Volume 5, December 2007. Pages 227-239.]

“The dialectics of the concrete totality is not a method that would naively aspire to know all aspects of reality exhaustively and to present a ‘total’ image of reality, with all its infinite aspects and properties. Concrete totality is not a method for capturing and describing all aspects, features, properties, relations and processes of reality. Rather, it is a theory of reality as a concrete totality. This conception of reality, of reality as concreteness, as a whole that is structured (and thus is not chaotic), that evolves (and this is not immutable and given once and for all), and that is in the process of forming (and thus is not ready-made in its whole, with only its parts, or their ordering, subject to change), has certain methodological implications that will become a heuristic guide and an epistemological principle for the study, description, comprehension, interpretation and evaluation of certain thematic sections of reality, be it physics or literary criticism, biology or political economy, theoretical problems of mathematics or practical issues of organizing human life and social conditions.” [Karel Kosík. Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World. Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt, translators. Dordrecht, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company. 1976. Page 19.]

“The various human sciences are occupied with either one or the other special aspect of man. When they explain their observations systematically, these sciences proceed from their own special viewpoints to develop a conception of man as a whole. The problem to which they address themselves is summed up in the question, What is man? The answers they give add up to a depressing variety of definitions, since each one allows itself broader and broader range in positing man’s fundamental characteristics. It is true that man is a living being who produces tools, but it is equally true to say he is a living being who employs symbols, who knows of his own mortality, who is capable of saying No, who is a social being, and so on. One definition cannot dispute the assumptions of another, for every particular aspect of man is isolated, and none of them is capable, from its own particular standpoint, of providing a notion of the whole man, concretely and as a totality.” [Karel Kosík. Man and Philosophy. Pacifica, California: Marxists Internet Archive (Marxists.org) ebook edition. 1965.]

“If one does not investigate the work as a signifying structure whose concreteness is grounded in existence as a moment of social reality, and if one sees determination only ιlink’ between the work and social reality, then the work as a relatively autonomous signifying structure changes into a structure that is absolutely autonomous: concrete totality turns, again, into false totality. Hidden in theory of social thesis are two completely different meanings of social determination of the work.” [Karel Kosík, “Historism and Historicism.” New German Critique. Number 10, winter 1977. Pages 65-75.]

“The term pseudo-concrete is used by Karel Kosík in his Dialectics of the Concrete, originally published in Czech in 1963.” [Sven Lütticken, “Attending to Abstract Things.” New Left Review. Series 2, number 54, November–December 2008. Pages 101-122.]

“By exploring the nature of this IR [international relations] theory–FPA [foreign policy analysis] divide and by proceeding through a critique of the understandings of dialectics in mainstream Marxism, the objective of this paper is to clarify how a specific understanding of dialectics—the dialectics of the concrete—may help to provide the missing epistemological foundations for bridging this gap [‘between general Marxist theories of IR and the analysis of foreign policy-making’] within mainstream and Marxist IR approaches.…

“‘Dialectics is after the “thing itself”’ ([according to Karel] Kosík …) much like any other view of the world.…

“… dialectics sees contradictions as constitutive of the concrete existence of any phenomenon.”

[Benno Teschke and Can Cemgil, “The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis.” Globalizations. Volume 11, number 5, 2014. Pages 605-625.]

“Much of the praxis of everyday life relates to concrete relations and, as has been shown by Karel Kosík, life takes place within what appears as a consummate world of things, institutions and contexts in which the individual’s activities are expressed as a form of routine performance ….

“… There is a risk that lived experience becomes no more than a discourse on perceived personal spatiality or a representation and thereby increasingly loses sight of one of the constituent elements of the dialectic of the concrete.”

[Jan Öhman, “Towards a Digital (Societal) Infrastructure?” Urban Studies. Volume 47, number 1, January 2010. Pages 183-195.]

“… I have no desire to deny the possibility of improvement on the Egalitarian Democracy conception of peoples’ democracies. Other conceptions will involve counterparts of a kind to the propositions about interest-groups in the first two elements of the conception of Hierarchic Democracy. It seems, nonetheless, that this further reflection on the peoples’ democracies will not put in doubt the principal distinction between them and the liberal democracies. It is that the peoples’ democracies are guided or constrained by a national ideology of egalitarianism. This is more approximate to the Principle of Equality than any ideology that can be assigned to Hierarchic Democracy.” [Ted Honderich, “Hierarchic Democracy.” New Left Review. Series I, number 204, March–April 1994. Pages 48-66.]

“This treatise proposes the practice of becoming-responsible as a basis for integral micropolitics, defined as taking active responsibility for the well-being of the totality of living beings without exception, for the sake of that well-being alone.…

“… For the purposes of macropolitics or politics as such, a subject is tasked with responsibility for the development and potential transformation of an object of public concern such as a ‘public’ as such (as a tyrant, an oligarch, or in a participatory way as a citizen in a democracy)—or is excluded from that responsibility, becoming a responsibility of another, ‘handing over’ by virtue of life circumstance any control over the terms of one’s future, or the future of one’s community or nation in relation to others. Because this is an unjust relation—some, by accident of birth or life chances, have control over the lives of others who themselves have no control over the terms by which they must live—I assume it is better to ensure that all who are capable of becoming-responsible for themselves and for others find the opportunity to do so, which is to say, I assume the present regime of ‘uneven geographical development’ … to be unsatisfactory and in need of transformation. Specifically, I do not object to ‘hierarchy’ as such or differentiation as such, nor do I assume unity or totality to be necessarily oppressive; I do have reason to object to the terms and conditions of the present order, the kinds and qualities of hierarchy and differentiation prevalent and possible now.”

[Daniel Gustav Anderson, “‘Sweet Science’: A Proposal for Integral Macropolitics.” Integral Review. Creative Commons. Volume 6, number 1, March 2010. Pages 10-62.]

“In the present inquiry I propose two related interventions, one into integral theory and culture, and another implementing the theoretical positions I take into praxis in the world at large, with the theory intended to make transformative praxis possible, and the conditions of praxis intended to make the theory useful and responsible for building a life worth living for all. I argue eight separate theses (listed below), which either follow from each other logically, or recontextualize extant integral models into the framework I construct, or both. Holding all eight together is the conviction that humanity is confronting an apparently fragmented but in reality integrated set of problems, many of them violent—social, ecological, economic, legal, political, subjective—that are best addressed by an integrated set of solutions, such that transformation of the holy, horrible mess we inhabit into a sane, nonviolent, and democratic order becomes possible. This is, obviously, a utopian ambition.

“I mean something very specific by integral theory. Broadly speaking, the integral part of integral theory seeks to address the problem of everything ([Ken] Wilber …), and to propose means of transforming it: first to grasp this puzzling, preposterous world for what it is, with our confused and problematic selves, in order to then help solve the problem, thus giving two interventions.”

[Daniel Gustav Anderson, “‘Such a Body We Must Create:’ New Theses on Integral Micropolitics.” Integral Review. Creative Commons. Volume 4, number 2, December 2008. Pages 4-70.]

“In this article, we seek to advance the interconnection between empirical and normative research in business ethics by presenting a normative theory, called integrative social contracts theory (ISCT), which incorporates empirical findings as part of a contractarian process of making normative judgments. Derived from roots in classical and social contract theory, this integrative theory recognizes ethical obligations based upon two levels of consent: first, to a theoretical ‘macrosocial’ contract appealing to all rational contractors and second, to real ‘microsocial’ contracts by members of numerous localized communities. Through this process, we seek to put the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ in symbiotic harmony, requiring the cooperation of both empirical and normative research in rendering ultimate value judgments. In order to render normative judgments under the contractarian framework presented, it is necessary first to make accurate empirical findings concerning the ethical attitudes and behaviors of members of relevant communities. The emphasis on the role of communities in generating moral norms characterizes this approach as communitarian.” [Thomas Donaldson and Thomas W. Dunfee, “Toward a Unified Conception of Business Ethics: Integrative Social Contracts Theory.” The Academy of Management Review. Volume 19, number 2, April 1994. Pages 252-284.]

“[Thomas] Donaldson and [Thomas W.] Dunfee … advanced earlier work on the social contract for business by developing integrative social contracts theory. Consistent with earlier social contract theory, this theory holds that the content of community social contracts must be informed by broader social principles, or hypernorms, and based on the consent of participants. The notion of micro social contracts, as Donaldson and Dunfee … call them, defines the content and application of normative principles for a community. Translated to the organizational level, our idea of a micro-economic social contract, which is distinct from but related to Donaldson and Dunfee’s term, specifies the obligations that people hold for enterprises, as opposed to an entire economic system.” [George W. Watson, Jon M. Shepard, and Carroll U. Stephens, “Fairness and Ideology: An Empirical Test of Social Contracts Theory.” Business & Society. Volume 38, number 1, March 1999. Pages 83-108.]

“… the ‘everyday’ signifies a kind of a generalized point of attraction for the critique of prewar Marxist orthodoxy and bourgeois science. In this, the formation of the term in Europe is inseparable from the euphoric reinterpretation of Marxism as a theory of praxis in the early 1920s in Europe: the origins of Marxism as cultural critique. Thus, in the three founding texts of the philosophy of praxis, Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (1923), [Georg] Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) – his farewell to a Romantic naturalization of the everyday as ‘inauthentic’ – and Lukács’s Lenin (1924), the term der Alltag [the everyday] is rarely used and is never a focus for the discussion of political practice ….” [John Roberts, “Philosophizing the everyday: The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 98, November/December 1999. Pages 16-29.]

“… I have come to the conclusion that the questions posed by ‘political theology’ benefit by being connected with what I, and many others, have called ‘economic theology.’ … The notion of ‘economic theology’ strikes me as useful in developing [Walter] Benjamin’s suggestive but unelaborated insight (although all of his later work can be seen as an implicit elaboration and exploration of the connection between Capitalism and Christian Theology). The ‘cares and troubles’ addressed by traditional religions Benjamin associated with ‘guilt’: Capitalism, he argued, was the first religion that did not seek to provide a solution to the problem of guilt, to de-culpabilize, but rather to universalize it.… This I think is important: it is the Logic of a Universal and self-identical theos, a Creator God, that is the origin of Guilt, and hence at the origin of Economic Theology and the political (but also cultural) tradition it informs. The problem is quite simply this: if God is One and the Same, Self-Identical, and above all, immortal—or rather beyond Life and Death—then mortality, which characterizes all living beings qua living, and finitude, which characterizes all beings qua singular, whether animate or inanimate, has to be explained in a way that does not call into question the unity, unicity and self-identity of their divine origin.” [Samuel Weber, “Theology, Economy and Critique (Interviewed by Diego Rossello).” Revista Pléyade. Number 8, July–December 2011. Pages 199-2011.]

“Since I will be discussing texts and attitudes not usually associated with economics or politics, let me begin by stating my conviction that modern economic policies, attitudes and behaviors are decisively informed by factors that derive from the Judeo-Christian theological tradition—and that this holds true for an age that prides itself on being secular. I will argue that discussions of debt, and of the present crisis to which it contributes, can benefit from taking into account a dimension of the problem that is usually ignored or minimized, and that could be designated ‘economic theology’—a term meant to call attention to its relation to the notion of political theology, dating from the eighteenth century but today largely associated with the writings of Carl Schmitt. I do not present either of these perspectives as definitive or exhaustive, but I do want to suggest that they can provide insights into an economic and political situation that seems ever more irrational and dysfunctional—possibly even suicidal—with every passing day. It is a situation in which members of ‘democratic’ societies—not just policy-makers and representatives but also substantial segments of those victimized by these designated ‘decision-makers’—continue to endorse the parties, policies and institutions directly and indirectly responsible for the deterioration of their living conditions. My hope is that by contributing to our understanding of how such behavior can persist in the face of what should be the dissuasive effect of the policies it endorses, an economic-theological analysis of political behavior and attitudes can perhaps prepare the way for modifying these dominant tendencies—although I harbor no illusions about the power of discursive analyses to translate directly into critical transformative action.” [Samuel Weber, “The Debt of the Living.” Postmodern Culture. Volume 23, number 3, May 2013. Pagination unknown.]

“I ground my theoretical approach in critical rational choice theory because this facilitates reflection upon the complex character of choice discourses connected with the EC [European Community] Proposal. Consequently, I aim to explore constructions of, and assumptions about, human and nonhuman animal liberties (and associated moral positions on these) and investigate how the language in the texts constructs and reconstructs human choices about nonhuman animal experiments.” [Kay Peggs, “Nonhuman Animal Experiments in the European Community: Human Values and Rational Choice.” Society and Animals. Volume 18, 2010. Pages 1-20.]

“An incidental advantage of an exchange theory is that it might bring sociology closer to economics—that science of man most advanced, most capable of application, and, intellectually, most isolated.…

“… For a person engaged in exchange, what he gives may be a cost to him, just as what he gets may be a reward, and his behavior changes less as profit, that is, reward less cost, tends to a maximum. Not only does he seek a maximum for himself, but he tries to see to it that no one in his group makes more profit than he does. The cost and the value of what he gives and of what he gets vary with the quantity of what he gives and gets.…

“In our unguarded moments we sociologists find words like ‘reward’ and ‘cost’ slipping into what we say. Human nature will break in upon even our most elaborate theories. But we seldom let it have its way with us and follow up systematically what these words imply. Of all our many ‘approaches’ to social behavior, the one that sees it as an economy is the most neglected, and yet it is the one we use every moment of our lives—except when we write sociology.”

[George C. Homans, “Social Behavior as Exchange.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 63, number 6, May 1958. Pages 597-606.]

“The results of my efforts at showing that many of the findings of the more social parts of social psychology follow from the propositions of behavioral psychology appeared first in my paper ‘Social Behavior as Exchange’ ….” [George Casper Homans, “A Life of Synthesis.” The American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 12, number 1, September/October 1968.]

“I shall argue that despite all its limitations, rational action or choice theory (RAT) is what we are after. At least, it is where we should start. I am well aware that this is regarded in many circles as heterodox in the sense that sociological theory often is interpreted as an attempt to transcend rational choice. Two remarks: First, I think it would be unfortunate to set up stark oppositions. In adopting a RAT perspective, we must guard against throwing out all that has been achieved by way of criticism of RAT. The last thing sociological theory needs is an intellectual balkanization. The challenges are complex and technically demanding well beyond our present capabilities, and a certain mutual goodwill and tolerance is needed. Second, it is important to recognize that in choosing a theoretical way of looking at things, one is not going to entirely secure oneself against conceptual and epistemological criticism. Theoretical conjecture is usually a matter of choosing the least worst among a set of competing possibilities.” [Peter Abell, “Is Rational Choice Theory a Rational Choice of Theory?” Rational Choice Theory: Advocacy and Critique. James S. Coleman and Thomas J. Fararo, editors. Newbury Park, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1992. Pages 183-206.]

“Sociological rational choice is an inherently multilevel enterprise. It seeks to account for social outcomes on the basis of both social context and individual action. In this respect it often differs, at least in emphasis, from other (thin) versions of rational choice theory that are employed in much economic analysis and game theory. Sociological rational choice is beginning to make empirical contributions to a broad range of substantive topics in the discipline. While applications of rational choice in subfields like politics, labor markets, formal organizations, and criminology by now are traditional, the approach has also begun to make empirical advances in areas formerly regarded as inhospitable, such as the family, gender, and religion.” [Michael Hechter and Satoshi Kanazawa, “Sociological Rational Choice Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology. Volume 23, 1997. Pages 191-214.]

“The utility premise of rational choice theory has an obvious affinity for the deterrence doctrine in criminology. Deterrence and the utilitarian view of rational human nature have been with us since at least the eighteenth century. The deterrence doctrine, which was at the heart of classical criminology, arguably has been the most researched topic in criminology since the latter part of the 1960s.” [Ronald L. Akers, “Rational Choice, Deterrence, and Social Learning Theory in Criminology: The Path Not Taken.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Volume 81, issue 3, fall 1990, article 6. Pages 653-676.]

“Ecology can be defined as the study or story (logos) of the place where we live (oikos), or better, the place that we live. For a thing-power materialist, that place is a dynamic flow of matter-energy that tends to settle into various bodies, bodies that often join forces, make connections, form alliances.… For a thing-power materialist, humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky web of connections or an ecology.

“Thing-power is the lively energy and/or resistant pressure that issues from one material assemblage and is received by others. Thing-power, in other words, is immanent in collectives that include humans, the beings best able to recount the experience of the force of things. Thing-power materialism emphasizes the closeness, the intimacy, of humans and nonhumans.”

[Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory. Volume 32, number 3, June 2004. Pages 347-372.]

“Sadly, the average voter in the US is either unaware and/or unconcerned about the effects of this deterioration in democracy. The true situation is that the control of the economic and political processes in the US has fallen into the hands of the selfish ultra-minority of the wealthiest citizenry. The driving force is the growing prevalence of the above three values/beliefs: Short term mentality leads to ‘at least not in my lifetime’ thinking that justifies such things as outrageous climate change denial. Putting self ahead of anyone else is reflected in support for Trump’s wall, deportation policy, trade-war threats, and military threats. Ends justifies the means is clearly the rationale that has resulted in Republican do-nothing grid-lock in Congress and the flawed argument that the current sitting President should ‘let the people decide’ via hopeful election of their party to the presidency whereby they openly state a bias for appointing Supreme Court justices who will support their own agendas.” [Richard A. Engdahl, “Preventing the Demise of American Democracy: An OD Challenge.” Organization Development Journal. Voluem 35, number 1, spring 2017. Pages 35-45.]

“Each of these ramifications of the concept of freedom is connected with the ecological crisis that now faces mankind. First, man as a bio-sociotechnical creature is not free of the ecological consequences of his actions. Second, the ecological crisis has already diminished the actual freedom of millions of the Earth’s inhabitants. Third, we must now ask what freedoms must we give up if we are to resolve the ecological crisis.…

“The ecological crisis has already diminished the freedom of millions of the world’s people. For example, a vast increase in population which has out-stripped the world’s capacity to feed it has condemned over one half of the Earth’s peoples to a life and death of semi-starvation.”

[Graham Woods, “Ecology and Freedom.” Australian Left Review. Volume 1, issue 36, July 1972. Pages 21-26.]

“1 am frequently asked during discussion of the kinds of question raised in this paper what we can do about changing the direction of those ponderously charging run-away dinosaurs, the over-developed countries. (Needless to say, the destinies of the so-called underdeveloped countries may safely be trusted to their own peoples, and our role as regards them is primarily one of hindering and finally helping to halt imperialism from inside, in co-ordination with the liberation struggles outside, the metropolitan walls.) This brings us to the most direct application of the term ‘the politics of ecology’ — namely the actual political possibilities opened up to us by the variety of ecological movements sprouting left, right and centre.” [Malcolm Caldwell, “The Politics of Ecology.” Australian Left Review. Volume 1, issue 36, July 1972. Pages 27-29.]

“The Neo-Europes collectively and singly are important, more important than their sizes and populations and even wealth indicate. They are enormously productive agriculturally, and with the world’s population thrusting toward 5 billion and beyond, they are vital to the survival of many hundreds of millions. The reasons for this productivity include the undeniable virtuosity of their farmers and agricultural scientists and, in addition, several fortuitous circumstances that require explanation. The Neo-Europes all include large areas of very high photosynthetic potential, areas in which the amount of solar energy, the sunlight, available for the transformation of water and inorganic matter into food is very high. The quantity of light in the tropics is, of course, enormous, but less than one might think, because of the cloudiness and haziness of the wet tropics and the unvarying length of the day year-round.” [Alfred W. Crosby, “Ecological Imperialism.” The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Pages 418-422.]

“The field of sociology can be described as a triangle, the apexes of which are represented by the structure of social organisation ([Herbert] Spencer’s theory of the division of labour), the structure of cultural codes ([Ferdinand de] Saussure’s theory of language and semiology) and social action ([Max] Weber’s methodological individualism). This becomes a three-dimensional discursive space when underneath it we place, as the fourth apex, nature. Consequently we have a triangular pyramid standing on its head (nature): its four plans are represented by the field of sociology (the structure of social organisation, the structure of cultural codes, action), structuralist social anthropology (the structure of social organisation, the structure of cultural codes, nature), cultural anthropology (the structure of cultural codes, action, nature) and historical materialism (the structure of social organisation, action, nature).…

“With the conditions of discourse, I mean the set of those more or less conscious ways of questioning, setting rules, and structuring which make us recognise a certain speech on society as sociology and which we also have to lean on when producing sociological speech ourselves. These conditions of discourse say nothing about the contents of different sociological interpretations; the only thing they do is determine which interpretation is sociology and which is not. In other words, they tell us what type of literature sociology is but not what this literature says.”

[Risto Heiskala, “Sociology as a Discursive Space: The Coming Age of a New Orthodoxy?” Acta Sociologica. Volume 33, number 4, 1990. Pages 305-320.]

“This journal [Dialectical Anthropology] is a significant episode in a wider effort to resurrect and redefine the Marxist tradition, and constitutes the beginning of a comprehensive critique of the anthropological aspect of academic social science. But it is neither difficult nor particularly courageous to destroy the pretensions of academic social science. There is more at issue here than that. The goal is to re-evaluate the whole tradition – and here I must speak for myself, in the hope that I express the common sense of the endeavor – of which [Karl] Marx became the critical cutting edge. That tradition gathers social force in the eighteenth century, in the paradigmatic and wide-ranging work of [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau, pauses among the Utopian socialists in bourgeois post-revolutionary Europe, and is transformed into a conscious revolutionary undertaking by Marx several decades later with the inception of industrial capitalism. The undertaking is critical and dialectical, both with reference to method and praxis. Its purpose is the revolutionary reconstruction of contemporary Western civilization in all its basic, related aspects; the dialectical method and the deep historical perspective illuminate the need for, while contributing to, that end.” [Stanley Diamond, “The Marxist Tradition as a Dialectical Anthropology.” Dialectical Anthropology. Volume 1, number 1, November 1975. Pages 1-5.]

“… Dialectical Anthropology [the journal] orients itself toward ‘the transformation of class society through internationalizing conversations about the stakes of contemporary crises and the means for social change.’ However, the environment in which we work as well as the tasks and perspectives that guide our work have changed over the years. It is for this reason that we use this fortieth year reflection to consider what has changed and where weare going both as a journal and a species living on this planet. For this reason, we have included not only the interventions of many scholars on the contemporary dynamics and historical transformations of capitalism.” [Winnie Lem and Anthony Marcus, “The Marxist tradition as a dialectical anthropology: 40 years on.” Dialectical Anthropology. Volume 40, issue 2, June 2016. Pages 57-58.]

“… I … [present] a kind of ‘dialectical anthropology’ – a theory of human being that attempts to follow its repressed potentials – that might be seen to respond to the conception of human being frequently advanced in the history of political thought. Insofar as it is addressed to a particular relation between philosophical conceptions of ‘human being’ and ‘state,’ this ‘dialectical anthropology’ is already in some sense a philosophical anthropology. That is to say, it is an immanent critique of ‘man’ through his philosophical conception – not a criticism or even discussion of the empirical study of human beings, their origins, or development from the perspective of the discipline ‘anthropology.’” [Caleb Basnett, “Toward a Dialectical Anthropology: Rethinking the Concept of ‘Human Being’ with Herbert Marcuse.” Problématique. Issue 13, 2011. Pages 45-70.]

“I am certainly not the first to challenge the tradition of social and cultural critique my generation grew up in. Many authors have declared that it day are gone. Once we could have fun denoundng the dark, solid reality concealed behind the brilliance of appearances. But today there is allegedly no longer any solid reality to counter-pose to the reign of appearances, nor any dark reverse side to be opposed to the triumph of consumer society. Let me say at the outset: I do not intend to add my voice to this discourse. On the contrary, I would like to show how that the concepts and procedures of the critical tradition are by no mean obsolete. They still function very well, precisely in the discourse of those who proclaim their extinction. But their current usage witnesses a complete reversal of their orientation and supposed ends. We must therefore take account of the persistence of a model of interpretation and the inversion of its sense, if we wish to engage in a genuine critique of critique.” [Jacques Rancière. The Emancipated Spectator. Gregory Elliott, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2009. Page 25.]

“Emancipation entails an idea of distance opposed to the stultifying one. Speaking animals are distant animals who try to communicate through the forest of signs. It is this sense of distance that the ‘ignorant master’—the master who ignores inequality—is teaching. Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condition of communication. It is not a gap that calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it. The distance that the ‘ignorant’ person has to cover is not the gap between his ignorance and the knowledge of his master; it is the distance between what he already knows and what he still doesn’t know hut can learn by the same process. To help his pupil cover that distance, the ‘ignorant master’ need not be ignorant. He need only dissociate his knowledge from his mastery.” [Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator.” Artform. March 2007. Pages 270-281.]

“Aesthetics promises a non-polemical, consensual framing of the common world. Ultimately the alternative to politics turns out to be aestheticization, viewed as the constitution of a new collective ethos.… The scenario makes politics vanish in the sheer opposition between the dead mechanism of the State and the living power of the community, framed by the power of living thought. The vocation of poetry—the task of ‘aesthetic education’—is to render ideas sensible by turning them into living images, creating an equivalent of ancient mythology, as the fabric of a common experience shared by the elite and by the common people. In their words: ‘mythology must become philosophy to make common people reasonable and philosophy must become mythology to make philosophers sensible.’” [Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy.” New Left Review. Series II, number 14, March–April 2002. Pages 133-151.]

“Commitment is not a category of art. This does not mean that art is apolitical. It means that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own meta-politics.… There are politics of aesthetics, forms of community laid out by the very regime of identification in which we perceive art (hence pure art as well as committed art).” [Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Gabriel Rockhill, translator. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2004. Page 60.]

“… there is no criterion for establishing an appropriate correlation between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics. This has nothing to do with the claim made by some people that art and politics should not be mixed. They intermix in any case; politics has its aesthetics, and aesthetics has its politics. But there is no formula for an appropriate correlation.” [Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Gabriel Rockhill, translator. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2004. Page 62.]

“In spite of his in some ways unfortunate influence, in my opinion, [Immanuel] Kant’s works are and will continue to be a major source of inspiration. In what follows, I borrow his distinction between moral and beautiful actions. I foresee a bright future for his terminology. It offers a fairly new perspective on our actions within the realm of radical environmentalism, or more specifically within the deep ecology movement.…

“A most common commentary by many people who for the first time listen to a description of deep ecology is, ‘But that is what I have always thought. Only, I did not have words for it.’ They presumably had acted beautifully, without toil, and without words! It is unnecessary to add that the information, ‘This means you have always acted beautifully!’ might have made them proud and eager to continue.”

[Arne Næss, “Beautiful Action. Its Function in the Ecological Crisis.” Environmental Values. Volume 2, number 1, spring 1993. Pages 67-71.]

“Among ecological thinkers there has been an attempt to move beyond the limitations of ecological science toward a nature philosophy and earth-based culture. Some have pro-posed a new perspective, deep ecology, as an emerging social model or ‘new paradigm’ for humanity’s relationship with nature. Deep ecology is a rather eclectic mixture of writings and influences, drawing on the one hand from romantic and transcendentalist writings, nature poetry, Eastern mysticism, and the land wisdom of primal peoples, and on the other hand from general ecological science, including modern Malthusianism. This far-from-coherent mixture is not entirely separate from ecology in general. At the same time, an organized deep-ecology action movement has appeared, with a newspaper and many local chapters and contacts, as well as its own mythos, history, intellectual luminaries, and militant chieftains.” [George Bradford. How Deep is Deep Ecology? Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 1989. Page 7.]

“One wonders whether deep ecology’s biocentric maxim that all living beings can be equatable with one another in terms of their ‘intrinsic worth’ would have had any meaning during the long eras of organic evolution before human beings emerged. The entire conceptual framework of deep ecology is entirely a product of human agency — a fact that imparts to the human species a unique status in the natural world. All ethical systems (including those that can be grounded in biotic evolution) are formulated by human beings in distinctly cultural situations. Remove human agency from the scene, and there is not the least evidence that animals exhibit behaviour that can be regarded as discursive, meaningful, or moral.” [Brian Morris, “Reflections on ‘Deep Ecology.’” Deep Ecology & Anarchism: A Polemic. Murray Bookchin, editor. Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 1993. Pages 23-31.]

“Many supporters of the deep ecology movement have been uncomfortable and on the defensive concerning the question of ecofascism, because of criticism levelled against them, such as for example from some supporters of social ecology, who present themselves as more knowledgeable on social matters. (The term ‘social ecology’ implies this.) This bulletin is meant to change this situation. I will try to show why I have arrived at the conclusion, after investigation, that ‘ecofascism’ has come to be used mainly as an attack term, with social ecology roots, against the deep ecology movement and its supporters plus, more generally, the environmental movement. Thus, ‘ecofascist’ and ‘ecofascism’, are used not to enlighten but to smear.” [David Orten. Ecofascism: What is It?—A Left Biocentric Analysis. The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 2000. Page 3.]

“Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel of a kind of ‘original sin’ that accurses a vague species called humanity — as though people of color were equatable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiters.” [Murray Bookchin. Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement. The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 1987. Page 4.]

“The debates between social ecology and deep ecology characterized the emergent Green movement in the 1980s and 90s, and had a tremendous influence within the Earth First! movement. They reverberate today as we face an increasingly dire ecological future. Social ecology is primarily concerned with the dialectic between forms of domination in the human world, and how this leads to the domination of nature. It is a view that emphasizes that the solution to humans’ destruction of non-human nature is a social one. Deep ecology is more concerned with changing human consciousness, drawing from religious and philosophical perspectives. [Gary] Snyder acknowledges both, emphasizing the need to change consciousness, while advocating for social changes to reharmonize human’s relationship to non-human nature.” [Paul Messersmith-Glavin. Between Social Ecology and Deep Ecology: Gary Snyder’s Ecological Philosophy. The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 2011. Page 3.]

“Social ecology argues that the idea of dominating nature resulted from the domination of human by human, rather than the reverse. That is, the causes of the ecological crisis are ultimately and fundamentally social in nature. The historical emergence of hierarchies, classes, states, and finally the market economy and capitalism itself are the social forces that have, both ideologically and materially, produced the present despoliation of the biosphere.

“Deep ecology, by contrast, locates the origin of the ecological crisis in belief-systems, be they religions or philosophies. Most particularly, deep ecologists identify ancient near eastern religions, including those of Mesopotamia and Judea; Christianity; and the scientific worldview as fostering a mindset that seeks to ‘dominate nature.’ It is by ‘asking deeper questions,’ as Arne Naess puts it, that these origins are identified, so that the social causes of the ecological crisis are somehow relegated to the category ‘shallow.’”

[Janet Biehl. Theses on Social Ecology and Deep Ecology. The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 1995. Page 3.]

“Within the discourse of humanism, humanity becomes the universal exchange-value to which everything is measured, and in the process, all of nature is alienated. By reconstituting labour and consciousness within nature and engaging in a deep ecological Marxist analysis, we can accommodate the necessary soft-anthropocentrism of survival, while also understanding the power relationships that undergird the system and lead to the manifestation of certain maladaptive characteristics. The problem with deep ecology is that its principles have little practical applications and often rely on the very same binary dualisms they attempt to reject. Hence I argue for a post-humanist eco-humanism that acknowledges the necessity for a soft-anthropocentrism, but one based on a sense of ecological polity that allows for truly reciprocal relationships to form. In the well known passage about base and superstructure, [Karl] Marx states that ‘the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social consciousness’ …. By denying nature an independent subject position, humanity is completely ignoring its ecological base and building a tower of Babel on a crumbling foundation beset by the termites we have unleashed. Nature is the base, and culture, whether that of ants, baboons, fish, aspens, or humans, is the superstructure.…

“Although this paper is by no means comprehensive and much work remains to be done, the process of discursive hybridization and cross-pollination between Marx and deep ecology is meant to illustrate the literal interconnectedness of nature and culture. While Marxism fails to address many ecological problems, its mode of analysis and many of its criticisms of capitalism are germane to current analyses of the environmental crisis. This is especially the case in the Marxist analysis of labour and reification, processes which remain parasitically affixed to human-environmental interactions, and which augment and are augmented by a deep ecological critique of capitalism. By dialogically linking Marx and deep ecology, I hope it becomes clear that the fate of humanity and the fate of the biosphere are inseparable. The spectre of nature haunts humanity, but only because we have made nature into a ghost, an ephemeral stage upon which the human drama unfolds. It is time to realize that the human drama is but one show in an infinite programme of interrelated productions. It is time to listen, participate, and reciprocate, rather than direct.”

[Michael Mikulak, “Cross-pollinating Marxism and Deep Ecology: Towards a Post-humanist Eco-humanism.” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice. 2007. Pages 1-25.]

“… the countries that were the protagonists of three major liberal revolutions were simultaneously the authors of two tragic chapters in modern (and contemporary) history. If that is so, however, can the habitual representation of the liberal tradition namely, that it is characterized by the love of liberty as such be regarded as valid? Let us return to our initial question: What is liberalism? As we register the disappearance of the old certainties, a great saying comes to mind: ‘What is well known, precisely because it is well known, is not known. In the knowledge process, the commonest way to mislead oneself and others is to assume that something is well known and to accept it as such.’” [Domenico Losurdo. Liberalism: A Counter-History. Gregory Elliott, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2011. Page 27.]

“… we argue that both human reflexivity and systemic reflexivity can be understood as complementary social mechanisms of dealing with crises in a dual sense: on the one hand, they are a means to account for the self-destructive tendencies of social dynamics; on the other, they are a strategy for designing responses that seek to set limits on autonomized social processes. The notion of crisis here depends on a conceptualization of society as a domain of relations whose unity is never achieved through a coherent or stable principle. Instead, contradictory imperatives and structural inconsistencies remain in a state of latency in the working of social institutions: differently put, social life reproduces itself on the condition of the impossibility of achieving a definite state of perfect harmony ….” [Rodrigo Cordero, Aldo Mascareño, and Daniel Chernilo, “On the reflexivity of crises: Lessons from critical theory and systems theory.” European Journal of Social Theory. OnlineFirst edition. September, 2016. Pages 1-20.]

“… [The] universal depriving of acceptance, this ‘inhibiting’ or ‘putting out of play’ of all positions taken toward the already—given Objective world and, in the first place, all existential positions (those concerning being, illusion, possible being, being likely, probable, etc.), or, as it is also called, this ‘phenomenological epoché’ and ‘parenthesizing’ of the Objective world therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary we gain possession of something by it; and what we (or, to speak more precisely, what I, the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them: the universe of ‘phenomena’ in the (particular and also the wider) phenomenological sense. The epoche can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend myself purely: as Ego, and with my own pure conscious life, in and by which the entire Objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me. Anything belonging to the world, any spatlotemporal being, exists for me that is to say, is accepted by me in that I experience it, perceive it, remember it, think of it somehow, judge about it, value it, desire it, or the like.” [Edmund Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Dorion Cairns, translator. The Hague, the Netherlands, Boston, Massachusetts, and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. 1960. Pages 20-21.]

“When the new phenomenology introduced itself at one and the same time as a beginning and as a universal methodology for a phenomenological philosophy, that amounted to saying that any philosophy whatsoever, taken as a systematic whole, can assume the form of an ultimately rigorous science only as a universal transcendental philosophy, but also only on the basis of phenomenology and in the specifically phenomenological method.…

“In itself, eidetic science everywhere precedes science of facts and makes possible for the first time the theoretically highest formation of the latter in ‘rational’ theories, thus, of course, in natural science. The eidetic transcendental science that is indeed to be grounded purely by itself, the universal science of essence of a transcendental subjectivity in general, has priority, with all transcendental phenomena that are a priori possible in it.…

“We, standing as actual subjects of reason in the actuality of fateful life, engage in science as function and method of precisely this life. Our interest lies, accordingly, in the factual. In further consequence, therefore, eidetic transcendental philosophy (transcendental phenomenology, as we also say) is the instrument or method for the transcendental science of matters of fact.”

[Edmund Husserl, “Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy.” Ted E. Kein, Jr. and William E. Pohl, translators. The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy. Volume 5, number 3, fall 1974. Pages 9-56.]

“… phenomenology will become a science.… Phenomenology … will not try to give a causal account of knowledge and its connection to the world; it will not seek to explain knowledge as a ‘natural fact’; it will not engage in theoretical constructions of the hypothetical-deductive sort. It cannot borrow from the results of empirical disciplines; more pointedly, it cannot be based upon the deliverances of psychology, either explanatory (as in [Wilhelm] Wundt), or descriptive (as in [Franz] Brentano). Nor can it make use of the speculations of evolutionary biology. Rather, its task is to exhibit the essence of knowing within the framework of the phenomenological reduction …. Thus it must remain entirely a matter of reflection, direct intuition, analysis, and description.” [Edmund Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. Lee Hardy, translator. Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Boston, Massachusetts, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1999. Page 6.]

“Empiricism altogether misunderstands the relation between the ideal and the real: it likewise misunderstands the relation between truth and inner evidence. Inner evidence is no accessory feeling, either casually attached, or attached by natural necessity, to certain judgements. It is not the sort of mental character that simply lets itself be attached to any and every judgement of a certain class, i.e. the so-called ‘true’ judgements, so that the phenomenological content of such a judgement, considered in and for itself, would be the same whether or not it had this character. The situation is not at all like the way in which we like to conceive of the connection between sensations and the feelings which relate to them: two persons, we think, have the same sensations, but are differently affected in their feelings. Inner evidence is rather nothing but the ‘experience’ of truth. Truth is of course only experienced in the sense in which something ideal can be an experience in a real act. Otherwise put: Truth is an Idea, whose particular case is an actual experience in the inwardly evident judgement.” [Edmund Husserl. The Shorter Logical Investigations. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 64-65.]

“Radical science demands the most radical rigor, which for its part demands the most complete illumination in the method of clariñcation. With this remark we dropped the word which is to form the theme of the following investigations. For what has been presented best prepared us for it. We have mentioned in the theory of the reductions also the reduction to the greatest possible clarity, which was spoken of as a special case of a universally important method of clarification in every scientific sphere. It is due to the peculiar position of phenomenology in relation to all other sciences that clarification in general, at whatever it is directed, and phenomenological clarification stand in a close relationship.” [Edmund Husserl, “The Method of Clarification.” Ted E. Klein, Jr. and William E. Pohl, translators. The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy. Volume 5, number 3, fall 1974. Pages 57-67.]

“The only relativism [Edmund] Husserl acknowledges as valid is that attached to historico-anthropological ‘facts’ as such and in their factuality.… Husserl undoubtedly thought that all of history’s determined possibles had to conform to the apriori essences of historicity concerning every possible culture, every possible language, every possible tradition. But never did he dream to foresee, by some eidetic deduction, all the facts, all the particular possibles which must conform to these a priori of universal historicity.” [Jacques Derrida. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Book imprint of University of Nebraska Press. 1989. Page 112.]

“Edmund Husserl’s entire life project, as he himself emphasised over and over, was to live the philosophical life, understood in the Socratic sense as a life of self-critical understanding and rational self-responsibility. He saw his duty as identifying the truly rational life and then living it.” [Dermot Moran. Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 187.]

“That Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), with his phenomenology, revolutionized the way philosophy was practised in the twentieth century is well known. It is less well known that his overall approach to the analysis of philosophical problems had much in common with practices associated with the then emerging ‘analytic’ philosophy. Both advocate rigorous method, abandoning speculation, solving problems rather than tracking themes through the history of philosophy, pursuing analyses through carefully drawn distinctions, and so on.” [Dermot Moran, “Edmund Husserl’s methodology of concept clarification.” The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. Michael Beaney, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Pages 235-256.]

“In this paper, as an initial attempt to explicate the complexity of phenomenological treatments of habit, I want to trace [Edmund] Husserl’s conception of habit as it emerged in his mature genetic phenomenology, in order to highlight his enormous and neglected original contribution in this area. I shall show that Husserl was by no means limited to a Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action (as commentators such as [Pierre] Bourdieu and [Hubert] Dreyfus have claimed), but attempted to characterize its complexity across the range of human individual, sub-personal, personal, social and collective experience.” [Dermot Moran, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Volume 42, number 1, January 2011. Pages 53-77.]

“Phenomenology, understood as the philosophical approach originated by Edmund Husserl in the early years of the twentieth century, has a complex history. In part it is the basis for what has become known as continental philosophy, where ‘continental’ means the European continent, despite the fact that much of continental philosophy since 1960 has been done in America. Within this designation one finds a number of philosophical approaches, some building on the insights of phenomenology, such as existentialism and hermeneutics (theory of interpretation), and others reacting critically against phenomenology, including certain post-structuralist or postmodernist ideas. There is, however, a line of major philosophical thinkers, including [Martin] Heidegger, [Jean-Paul] Sartre, and [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, who extend phenomenological philosophy from its origins in Husserl. Following this lineage means that we understand phenomenology to include a somewhat diverse set of approaches. To provide a basic idea of phenomenology, however, we will here focus on what these approaches have in common.” [Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 5-6.]

“A key, if often neglected aspect of the heritage of classical phenomenology, as it is encountered in the writings of the philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is a deep engagement with the question of the spiritual significance of the two world wars of the twentieth century and their aftermath. I would argue that the question of the meaning of the wars of the past century was not a mere occasional problem, but was in fact of decisive importance for classical phenomenological philosophy, even if there are relatively few specific texts that deal directly with the war itself. This engagement with the problem of war reflects the Platonic moment sketched above, insofar as the spiritual signifi cance of war is understood in terms of the manner in which selfhood (in authors such as Husserl and [Jan] Patočka, the selfhood represented by the very idea of ‘Europe’ and European culture itself) is put into question, and with that the very possibility of philosophy.” [James Dodd. Violence and Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Page 14.]

“Whether my experience and that of another person can be linked in a single system of intersubjective experience? There may well be, either in each sensory experience or in each consciousness, ‘phantoms’ which no rational approach can account for. The whole Transcendental Deduction hangs on the affirmation of a complete system of truth. It is precisely to the sources of this affirmation that we must revert if we wish to adopt a reflective method. In this connection we may hold with [Edmund] Husserl that [David] Hume went, in intention, further than anyone in radical reflection, since he genuinely tried to take us back to those phenomena of which we have experience, on the hither side of any formation of ideas,—even though he went on to dissect and emasculate this experience.” [Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 255-256.]

“… ‘phenomenology’ is typically understood as ‘the what’ that is studied or investigated in the philosophy of mind: it is ‘the passing show,’ ‘the flux of experience,’ ‘experience as it is undergone,’ it is ‘the what’ that makes it so that there is a ‘what it is like’ to subjective experience. While we will see in all the texts explored in this book a distinctive commitment to something like an ‘insider standpoint,’ phenomenology is definitely not philosophy which has a special interest in this conception of subjective experience. Indeed, phenomenologists – even the most Cartesian among them – are not, in general, warm to this conception at all. Edmund Husserl stresses that ‘in its proper sense’ the word ‘phenomenon’ relates to ‘that which appears’ and not the subjective phenomenon, ‘the appearance.’ [Martin] Heidegger is even more insistent: the term phenomenon as it shows up in the title phenomenology has, he states, ‘nothing at all to do with what is called an “appearance,” still less a “mere appearance.”’” [Simon Glendinning. In the Name of Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 7.]

“Though [Edmund] Husserl saw himself a new Moses [Hebrew/ʿIḇəriyṯ, מֹשֶׁה, Mōšẹh], he seems to us rather a new Odysseus [Greek/Hellēniká, Οδυσσέας, Odysséas], this polymechanos [Greek/Hellēniká, πολυμήχανος, polymḗchanos, ‘resourceful one,’ ‘ingenious one,’ or, literally, ‘very competent one’] of old, constantly struggling in his many homeward travels homeward with an ingenuity we can only marvel at. Too many scholars of Husserl’s philosophy seek less to take up the beginnings he laid out and to carry these forward with the tenacity and philosophical cunning exemplified by the old master. Too many remain content simply to interpret Husserl, where the true task is to go beyond him. This is indeed Husserl’s own hope. To go beyond him means, however, that we must understand his work rightly. This study is the first step in this direction … to understand his work rightly so that we can go beyond him.” [Bob Sandmeyer. Husserl’s Constitutive Phenomenology: Its Problem and Promise. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Page 151.]

“Born in Moravia [present-day Czech Republic], educated in Vienna [Austria] and Berlin [Germany], first in mathematics and later in philosophy, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) taught and wrote philosophy at a succession of German universities. He is best known as the founder of phenomenology, defined as the study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. Husserl’s phenomenology launched a philosophical program that changed the course of European thought. Not only the preeminent phenomenologist, Husserl was also one of the great systematic philosophers, akin to Aristotle and [Immanuel] Kant. It is time for Husserl to take his rightful place in this pantheon. Accordingly, this study of Husserl will focus on his overall system of philosophy, in which phenomenology plays its special role.” [David Woodruff Smith. Husserl. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 1.]

“[Edmund] Husserl reserved the notion of ‘natural attitude’ not just to point at the taken-for-grantedness of everyday thinking and acting. For him, the natural attitude is manifested in our natural inclination to believe that the world exists out there, independent of our personal human existence. The challenge for phenomenology is not to deny the external existence of the world, but to substitute the phenomenological attitude for the natural attitude in order to be able to return to the beginnings, to the things themselves as they give themselves in lived through experience— not as externally real or eternally existent, but as an openness that invites us to see them as if for the first time.” [Max van Manen. Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“One prominent concern of phenomenology has been to provide an account of the structures that make a shared, objective world intelligible. This account recognizes that bodies and skills are fundamental for this intelligibility. We consider this to be the most important and most productive strain of phenomenology, and this book is intended to give a clear introduction to it and its implications for contemporary work on perception, action, and cognition.

“Another strain of phenomenology, which we can only explore briefly in this book, gives a description of subjective experiences, especially of experiences that are unusual and hard to explain. So, for example, phenomenology might provide an analysis of what it is like to experience religious faith, overpowering sentiments such as love or anxiety, aesthetic highs, inescapable ambiguities and paradoxes, and so forth.”

[Stephen Käufer and Anthony Chemero. Phenomenology: An Introduction. Cambridge, England, and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2015. Pages 2.]

“Although phenomenology is concerned with ideas and essences, there is no denial of the world of nature, the so-called real world. The concept of realism became a major focus of transcendental phenomenology. Realism and objectivity presumably were the province of the natural sciences, yet ultimately the natural sciences operate from ideal principles in that they presuppose that objects that exist in time and space are real, that they actually exist, yet there is no evidence that objects are real, apart from our subjective experience of them. [Edmund] Husserl … observed that, ‘Naturalism recognizes the need of a scientific philosophy, but it is the greatest obstacle because it recognizes as real only the physical. The objectivity which it presupposes is essentially ideal and therefore a contradiction to naturalism’s own principles.’ Husserl concluded that ‘phenomenology is the “science of science” since it alone investigates that which all other sciences simply take for granted (or ignore), the very essence of their own objects.’” [Clark Moustakas. Phenomenological Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1994. Page 46.]

“The following questions are appropriate in evaluating research projects and reports of phenomenological psychology. Does the research address a significant topic and research problem that require qualitative knowledge of lived experience? Did the data collection provide genuine and adequate access to sufficiently varied lifeworld examples of the phenomena under investigation? Were all relevant data reflected upon with conceptual fidelity to participants’ experiential processes and meanings? Do the findings conceptually clarify the essence(s) of the research phenomena, including all constituents and themes in their holistic, structural relationships with each other? Are all knowledge claims supported by and illustrated with concrete evidence? Are the levels and kinds of generality achieved, the contextual limitations of the study, and the remaining open issues and questions transparently articulated? Do the eidetic descriptions intelligibly illuminate and ring true of all examples of the research phenomena both in the study’s data and in the literature, in the lifeworld, and in the reader’s experience and free imaginative variation? Are the contributions of the phenomenological findings to the theory and practice literature made explicit?” [Frederick J. Wertz, “A Phenomenological Psychological Approach to Trauma and Resilience,” in Frederick J. Wertz, Kathy Charmaz, Linda M. McMullen, Ruthellen Josselson, Rosemarie Anderson, and Emalinda McSpadden. Five Ways of Doing Qualitative Analysis: Phenomenological Psychology, Grounded Theory, Discourse Analysis, Narrative Research, and Intuitive Inquiry. New York and London: The Guilford Press imprint of Gulford Publications, Inc. 2011. Pages 124-164.]

“… [Phenomenological questions of the first order] are concerned with the systematic characterization of the phenomenology of the Ayahuasca experience. Essentially, these questions all pertain to one arch-question, namely—what is being experienced with Ayahuasca? What kinds of visions does Ayahuasca induce? What are the contents of these visions? What other kinds of experience are generated by the brew? These other kinds include non-visual perceptual effects, ideas and insights, and emotional and bodily effects. Note that some of these questions pertain to form whereas others pertain to content.…

“The phenomenological issues of the second order are concerned with lawful patterns revealed by relations between the elementary phenomena pertaining to the questions of the first order. Is there an order in what one experiences? Are there regularities in the progression of the visions and other experiences that Ayahuasca induces? Can distinct stages be defined? What are the patterns associated with moves between stages of visions? Also to be investigated are the progressions of experiences across sessions and their change over the course of long-term usage of Ayahuasca.

“Third are the questions of dynamics. These are concerned with how the Ayahuasca huasca experience unfolds in time. Closely related to the dynamic questions are the contextual ones. How are the various facets of the intoxication affected by the context in which one is situated—by the place, the social milieu, the interpersonal relationship at hand, the ritual being employed?”

[Benny Shanon. The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Kindle edition.]

“The undisputed founder of the phenomenological movement was Edmund Husserl, a German of Jewish descent (converted to Lutheranism in his twenties) who lived from 1859 to 1938. 1 He was very much the German professor: almost his whole adult life was bounded by the walls (and the attitudes) of ancient universities. Only the rampant antisemitism of the Nazis in his later years forced him reluctantly out of his political naivety. Like [Bertrand] Russell, and roughly at the same time, he came to philosophy out of mathematics by way of logic, and was similarly engrossed by problems of truth, meaning and knowledge. Like [Sigmund] Freud, and at roughly the same time, he self-consciously founded a school, and gathered around himself an everexpanding band of disciples. Like Freud also he was betrayed by his chosen St. Peter: for [Martin] Heidegger retained his master’s support not only for succession to his chair, but for publication of a work theoretically devastating Husserl’s position, and he eventually joined the Nazi Party.” [Roger Waterhouse, “Husserl and Phenomenology.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 16, spring 1977. Pages 27-38.]

“As we proceed to our study of the social world, we abandon the strictly phenomenological method. We shall start out by simply accepting the existence of the social world as it is always accepted in the attitude of the natural standpoint, whether in everyday life or in sociological observation. In so doing, we shall avoid any attempt to deal with the problem from the point of view of transcendental phenomenology. We shall, therefore, be bypassing a whole nest of problems whose significance and difficulty were pointed out by [Edmund] Husserl in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, although he did not there deal with these problems specifically. The question of the ‘meaning’ of the ‘Thou’ can only be answered by carrying out the analysis which he posited in that work. Even now, however, it can be stated with certainty that the concept of the world in general must be based on the concept of ‘everyone’ and therefore also of ‘the other.’” [Alfred Schutz. Phenomenology of the Social World. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, translators. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 1967. Kindle edition.]

“The sociology of knowledge … must concern itself with the social construction of reality. The analysis of the theoretical articulation of this reality will certainly continue to be a part of this concern, but not the most important part. It will be clear that, despite the exclusion of the epistemological/ methodological problem, what we are suggesting here is a far-reaching redefinition of the scope of the sociology of knowledge, much wider than what has hitherto been understood as this discipline.

“The question arises as to what theoretical ingredients ought to be added to the sociology of knowledge to permit its redefinition in the above sense. We owe the fundamental insight into the necessity for this redefinition to Alfred Schutz. Throughout his work, both as philosopher and as sociologist, Schutz concentrated on the structure of the common-sense world of everyday life.”

[Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London and New York: Penguin Books imprint of the Penguin Group. 1991. Page 27.[

“[Peter L.] Berger and [Thomas] Luckmann, and this thesis itself, begin with the granting of this radical revision. What must now be done is to look at some of the reasons why such a revision has seemed necessary. We may start by considering the work of Alfred Schutz, whose phenomenological inquiries into the philosophical foundations of the social sciences have pointed out several important reasons why these ‘sciences’ must especially be concerned with the epistemological complications of considering reality as socially constructed.” [Burke Curtis Thomason. Sociology and Existentialism: A Comparison of Perspectives with an emphasis on the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Ph.D. dissertation. Simon Fraser University. Burnaby, British Columbia. July, 1970. Page 132.]

“This article provides a first sketch of … a relational phenomenology of violence. In order to do this, I shall first outline the basic structure of the phenomenological method I deem most adequate to tackle phenomena of violence. Given that violence exists (but not violence tout court) and that it must always be considered within the horizon of its particular orders, I shall then analyze the double ‘fact of violence,’ its affective and symbolic dimensions and their inextricable interlacement. In a third part I shall address the consequences of these reflections, thereby identifying the main characteristics of the relational phenomenology of violence that is to result therefrom. Finally, I will close with a reflection concerning possible applications of the outlined conception and some future lines of argumentation.” [Michael Staudigl, “Towards a Relational Phenomenology of Violence.” Human Studies. Volume 36, number 1, 2013. Pages 43-66.]

“Thinking is always embodied, as a result it is also social and, as such, it also has political consequences. This thesis implies that it is not sufficient to describe embodiment to account for thought, as the body is inscribed in society and in political processes, which affect thinking just as much as the corporeal character of existence. In order to defend this thesis, I will develop the beginnings of a critical phenomenology that is already present in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, specifically in the reflection they developed on thinking and on the relationship between two modes of thinking about social life: philosophy and the social sciences.

“A first theme to be explored in the texts where Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty describe thinking as an activity that is embodied, as well as socially and politically situated, is their refusal of the ontological difference.”

[Jérôme Melançon, “Thinking Corporeally, Socially, and Politically: Critical Phenomenology after Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu.” Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique. Volume X, number 8, 2014. Pages 1-28.]

“My point is that critical phenomenology, by illuminating [Theodor] Adorno’s ‘element of otherness’ in the dialectic between the mode of the real and the mode of the possible, can serve as the means for a concrete theory of the reappropriation of history by the subjects.…

“… The critical phenomenology of the life-world and its social, economic, and political infrastructures … resituates the problem of reification thus disclosing, better than Frankfurt theory does, the historical possibilities of liberating praxis.”

[Herbert G. Reid, “Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change.” Dialectical Anthropology. Volume 2, number 2, May 1977. Pages 107-130.]

“Ignoring the handful of neo-Nazi Odinists and the large number of devotees of the decidedly atheistic Ayn Rand, America’s contemporary right-wing extremists are almost exclusively white, middle-aged Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Catholics, and Mormons animated by a doctrine known as ‘Dominionism.’ …

“What follows is a critical phenomenology of Dominionism: a detailed description of how movement activists see, think, remember, and feel about reality and their place in it. The method of phenomenology is to allow subjects to reveal themselves, to speak for themselves in their own words instead of imposing on them an explanatory model from the ‘outside’ …. The words I attend to here are derived from Dominionism’s on-line and paper communications: its books and pamphlets.”

[James Aho, “Christian Heroism and the Reconstruction of America.” Critical Sociology. Volume 39, issue 4, July 2013. Pages 545-560.]

“… a critical phenomenology is one which recognizes the spatio-temporal specificity of experience, the ontologically generative qualities of theorizing that experience, and the politics animated and articulated by particular distributions of the sensible.…

“… Drawing on the lessons of critical phenomenology by considering the socio-material relationality of sonic making by thinking of mediation as multiple registers which situate and shape existence and experience can simultaneously help open up the black boxes of both affective and representational political processes.”

[George Revill, “How is space made in sound? Spatial mediation, critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 40, number 2, April 2016. Pages 240-256.]

“The defect of modern liberalism is its desire to forget this totality but it is the task of a truly critical phenomenology, and a rational society in general, to remember it. If social relations only happen as political-economic relations the result is a perverted individuality in which we labor with and alongside others and yet are totally estranged from them. The problem of labor not only manifests itself within its political and economic expression, but also with the ontological institution in which it exists.” [Bradley King, “Putting Critical Theory to Work: Labor, Subjectivity and the Debts of the Frankfurt School.” Critical Sociology. Volume 36, number 6, November 2010. Pages 869-889.]

“I have here emphasized the achievements of such a critical phenomenology as regards the experiential dimension of social life, the acknowledgement of the other and the significance of human agency, all qualities of utmost importance to the kind of work from which I started this discussion. More generally, humanism can be seen as a practice, an interrogative orientation as integral to modes of both co-existence and critical intellectual engagement.” [Kirsten Simonsen, “In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 37, number 1, 2012. Pages 10-26.]

“I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore. Yet it is still being talked about. And the volumes of idiocies churned out over this past century do not seem to have clarified the problem. Besides, is there a problem? And what is it? Are there even women? True, the theory of the eternal feminine still has its followers; they whisper, ‘Even in Russia, women are still very much women’; but other well-informed people—and also at times those same ones—lament, ‘Woman is losing herself, woman is lost.’ It is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will always exist, if there should be women at all, what place they hold in this world, what place they should hold. ‘Where are the women?’ asked a short-lived magazine recently.” [Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, translators. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2010. Page 23.]

“The Second Sex shows that difference(s) need to be acknowledged since difference is the basis of both unfreedom and emancipation. The subordinating effects of diverse forms of oppressive power (sexism, racism, capitalism, colonialism, heteronormativity, etc.) hinge upon the repression of difference; the recognition of difference holds the possibility of an emancipatory effect. This anticipates feminisms that focus on difference such as cultural feminism, maternal feminism, French feminism, postcolonial feminism, black feminism, mestizo feminism and queer feminism. All concentrate on aspects of difference in resistance to patriarchal, white, Eurocentric, middle-class, heteronormative and able-bodied norms and argue for the deconstruction, revaluation and incorporation of ideas and practices into the body politic for meaningful social and political systems and participation.” [Nadine Changfoot, “The Second Sex’s Continued Relevance for Equality and Difference Feminisms.” European Journal of Women’s Studies. Volume 16, number 1, 2009. Pages 11-31.]

“Feminist phenomenology has developed out of the reconsideration and expansion of the work of some classical phenomenologists namely Edmund Husserl …, Martin Heidegger … and Maurice Merleau-Ponty …. Additionally, Simone de Beauvoir …, Judith Butler …, Iris Marion Young … and Sandra Lee Bartky … have all combined phenomenology with feminist theory (Schües et al, 2011) where their particular interest was to relate interpretive phenomenology to the issue of gender. While each method has its own identity, both phenomenology and feminism can be integrated in order to strengthen the overall philosophical foundation in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the experience of living with domestic violence and abuse ….” [Kathleen M. Baird, “Using feminist phenomenology to explore women’s experiences of domestic violence in pregnancy.” British Journal of Midwifery. Volume 22, number 6, June 2014. Pages 418-426.]

“What does it mean to pose the question of sexual difference as a philosophical question? Minimally, for both Beauvoir and Irigaray, to take up this question in these terms is to investigate the constitution of sexual difference rather than proceeding from the givenness of this difference. Feminist philosophy begins, in other words, by questioning the status of the object and the givenness of the very thing that is at the center of its inquiry. In this sense, the possibility of broaching sexual difference as a philosophical question is, for Beauvoir and Irigaray, identical with the possibility of feminist phenomenology.” [Anne van Leeuwen, “Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Possibility of Feminist Phenomenology.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Volume 26, number 2, 2012. Pages 474-484.]

“If women do ‘pursue their ascent’ as Simone de Beauvoir proposed …, then what better approach to take account of it than feminist phenomenology, which Beauvoir herself pioneered? Yet, feminist philosophy is slow to assimilate phenomenology to its methodology. It regards phenomenology’s nongendered frame of analysis with oft-repeated skepticism, while it continues to speculate upon phenomenology’s potential usefulness for investigating women’s lived body experience.” [Dianne Chisholm, “Climbing like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology.” Hypatia. Volume 23, number 1, January–March 2008. Pages 9-40.]

“[Simone de] Beauvoir does not view masochism as an inevitable outcome of female devotion and self-abandonment, inasmuch as it is not a natural tendency of woman or of resignation and self-forgetfulness (SS, 398, 652). But women are more prone to it than men, she thinks, and it is a ‘bypath’ that is frequently taken by the unsatisfied woman if the gift of herself is not wholeheartedly accepted and/or reciprocated by the beloved …. Young girls in particular are inclined toward masochism because they are often narcissistic or alienated from themselves in an alter ego that is dependent upon the will of others …. ‘Masochism exists,’ Beauvoir explains, ‘when the individual chooses to be made purely a thing under the conscious will of others, to see herself as a thing, to play at being a thing’ …. Blaming herself for submitting her ego to others, the young girl feels guilty and punishes herself by ‘voluntarily redoubling her humiliation and slavishness’ in a ‘sham abandon’ or masochistic play-acting that is ‘no true solution of the conflict created by woman’s sexual destiny, but a mode of escaping from it by wallowing in it’ …. For [Søren] Kierkegaard, too, feminine devotion and self-abandonment are potentially problematic for woman in that her natural tendency to give herself in devotion to others may result in negative consequences with both personal and religious implications.” [Sylvia Walsh, “Feminine Devotion and Self-Abandonment—Simone de Beauvoir and Søren Kierkegaard: On the Woman in Love.” Philosophy Today. Volume 42, 1998. Pages 35-40.]

“What is eco-phenomenology? This paper argues that eco-phenomenology, in which are folded both an ecological phenomenology and a phenomenological ecology, offers us a way of developing a middle ground between phenomenology and naturalism, between intentionality and causality.…

“… four strands — the invisibility of time, the celebration of finitude, the coordination of rhythms, and the interruption and breakdown of temporal horizons — offer us, I am suggesting, not just analytical pointers as to how we might think about time, but ways of enriching our temporal experience. This account occupies what I have called a middle ground overlapping the space of intentionality, avoiding both the language of causality and that of ecstatic intentionality. I am sure that an ecophenomenology could profitably pursue the theoretical elaborations that each of them would make explicit, but I will not do this here. The fundamental focus of these remarks has been on their contribution to an enhanced attentiveness to the complexity of natural phenomena and on the ease with which that is hidden from view by our ordinary experience.”

[David Wood, “What is Ecophenomenology?” Research in Phenomenology. Volume 31, 2001. Pages 78-95.]

“… my analysis is based on an interpretation of phenomenology which is anything but orthodox in the Husserlian sense. Thus there will be no reference to phenomenological reductions, transcendental egos or similar concepts. Instead, I shall advocate a wider conception of phenomenology which includes the common ground of the main currents within the phenomenological movement. Its guiding principle is: as direct an approach to the phenomena as possible, reducing presuppositions and commitments of a merely theoretical nature to a minimum, and always reserving the right to re-examine and revise them in the light of the phenomena subsequently encountered. In the pursuit of this objective the following steps can be distinguished:

“At this point I shall stop exploring the phenomenal features of the ego. Obviously this is merely a beginning, and I shall not even attempt to outline the unfinished business. The main purpose of the present discussion was to give an idea of the amount of new features which a phenomenological approach to this area can reveal. As such it could merely break the ground and prepare it for further cultivation.…

“Ordinary language fits ordinary phenomena. But not all phenomena are ordinary. If there are extraordinary phenomena, as I have tried to show in the case of the ego, they call for more than ordinary language. Such an ‘extraordinary’ language can be forged only in the light of an unrestricted direct study of the phenomena in their own right.”

[Herbert Spiegelberg, “A Phenomenological Approach to the Ego.” The Monist. Volume 49, number 1, January 1965. Pages 1-17.]

“… in view of [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s unsolved problem of the meaning of violence and its relation to brotherhood there is particular urgency for an explicit phenomenological analysis of violence in all its varieties. Certainly there have been plenty of assertions about violence, counter-violence and non-violence and even detailed reflections ever since Georges Sorel tried to rehabilitate and even glorify violence. But there is still a crying need for a deeper study of the consciousness of violence as a subjective and intersubjective phenomenon in relation to adjacent phenomena such as non-destructure compulsion and to violent and nonviolent resistance to oppression.” [Herbert Spiegelberg, “Sartre’s Last Word on Ethics in Phenomenological Perspective.” Research in Phenomenology. Volume 11, 1981. Pages 90-107.]

“Considerable evidence gathered in many contexts throughout human history indicates both that experience itself can be examined in a disciplined manner and that skill in such an examination can be considerably refined over time. We refer to the experience accumulated in a tradition that is not familiar to most Westerners but that the West can hardly continue to ignore—the Buddhist tradition of meditative practice—and pragmatic, philosophical exploration. Though considerably less familiar than other pragmatic investigations of human experience, such as psychoanalysis, the Buddhist tradition is especially relevant to our concerns, for, as we shall see, the concept of a nonunified or decentered (the usual terms are egoless or selfless) cognitive being is the cornerstone of the entire Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, this concept—although it certainly entered into philosophical debate in the Buddhist tradition—is fundamentally a firsthand experiential account by those who attain a degree of mindfulness of their experience in daily life. For these reasons, then, we propose to build a bridge between mind in science and mind in experience by articulating a dialogue between these two traditions of Western cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology.” [Francisco J. Varella, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1993. Page xviii.]

“What we are suggesting is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By embodied, we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together. What this formulation intends to convey is that reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself—and that reflective form of experience can be performed with mindfulness/awareness. When reflection is done in that way, it can cut the chain of habitual thought patterns and preconceptions such that it can be an open-ended reflection, open to possibilities other than those contained in one’s current representations of the life space. We call this form of reflection mindful, open-ended reflection.

“… By not including ourselves in the reflection, we pursue only a partial reflection, and our question becomes disembodied; it attempts to express, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, a ‘view from nowhere.’ It is ironic that it is just this attempt to have a disembodied view from nowhere that leads to having a view from a very specific, theoretically confined, preconceptually entrapped somewhere.”

[Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1993. Page 27.]

“Francisco Varela, an immunologist-turned-neuroscientist, Evan Thompson, a philosopher, and Eleanor Rosch, a psychologist, are radical critics of cognitive science, calling for what they consider to be more of a revolution than a set of reforms, and they have pooled their skills to execute what is surely the best informed, best balanced radical critique to date. Just how radical? Their heroes are the Buddha and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. They argue that Buddhist meditative traditions offer not just a wealth of important phenomena of human consciousness, but otherwise unobtainable insights into the relations of embodiment that permit us to understand how the inner and the outer, the first-person point of view and the objective point of view of science, can coexist.” [Daniel C. Dennett, “The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.” Review article. American Journal of Psychology. Volume 106, number 1, spring 1993. Pages 121-126.]

“… my claim is that neurophenomenology is a natural solution that can allow us to move beyond the hard problem in the study of consciousness. It has little to do with some theoretical or conceptual ‘extra ingredient’ …. Instead, it acknowledges a realm of practical ignorance that can be remedied. It is also clear that — like all solutions in science which radically reframe an outstanding problem rather than trying to solve it within its original setting — it has a revolutionary potential, a point to which I shall turn at the end of this article. In other words, instead of finding ‘extra ingredients’ to account for how consciousness emerges from matter and brain, my proposal reframes the question to that of finding meaningful bridges between two irreducible phenomenal domains. In this specific sense neurophenomenology is a potential solution to the hard problem by casting in an entirely different light on what ‘hard’ means.” [Francisco J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies. Volume 3, number 4, 1996. Pages 330-349.]

“The moniker ‘neurophenomenology’ hints at its interdisciplinary nature. As the name implies, the approach merges aspects of phenomenology in the tradition of [Edmund] Husserl, [Martin[ Heidegger and [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty with the empirically supported data-collection techniques of neuroscience. The neurophenomenology described herein is a specific methodology, drawing from a history of successful and innovative studies. It derives from a scientific direction indicated by Francisco Varela … and aims to bridge neurophysiological data and accounts of first-person experience.” [Lauren Reinerman-Jones, Brandon Sollins, Shaun Gallagher, and Bruce Janz, “Neurophenomenology: an integrated approach to exploring awe and wonder.” South African Journal of Philosophy. Volume 32, number 4, 2013. Pages 295-309.]

“Francisco Varela’s advocacy of a neurophenomenological approach in the dialogue between science and religion has served as a reference point for many researchers in this area. This approach emphasizes that contemplative traditions have given us valuable techniques for training individuals to introspect on their own mental processes, and that the resulting insights have the potential to partner cognitive neuroscience in its quest to understand features of consciousness and the mind.… [P]rior to the introduction of neurophenomenology by Varela the established approaches that had largely defined the dialogue between psychology and religion effectively disregarded teachings from contemplative traditions about the processes of the mind.” [Brian L. Lancaster, “Hermeneutic Neurophenomenology in the Science-Religion Dialogue: Analysis of States of Consciousness in the Zohar.” Religions. Volume 6, number 1, 2005. Pages 146-171.]

“Our neurophenomenological evidence regarding the operational/preparational structuring of the brain’s representational output and the functioning of the three categorical lenses, indicates that this proposal (the essence of religion is power) ignores two of the three forms we would expect the supernatural sense to adopt, and the discussion above has reviewed historical instances of religious supernaturalism envisaged in terms of all three optics: dynamistic, vitalistic, and moralistic. We have what could be termed ‘dynamistic monotheism,’ ‘ritualistic monotheism,’ and ‘rationalistic monotheism.’ In each case, the ‘monotheism’ is at the level of worldview, more a matter of the hegemony of one of our three neurophenomenal optics, rather than its singularity.” [Frederic H. Peters, “Neurophenomenology of the Supernatural Sense in Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. Volume 16, number 2, 2004. Pages 122-148.]

“Neurophenomenology is a perspective that is grounded first and foremost in the trained introspection of the structures of one’s own experience. We emphasize ‘trained’ here because of the oft-touted perils of naive introspection. Neurophenomenology requires more of phenomenological enquiry than mere careful introspection; it requires mature contemplation—the ability of the researcher to (1) slow her mental functions so that fine structural elements in experience can be more easily discerned; (2) eliminate the illusion of the ego; and (3) attenuate the conceptual, ideological, and cultural baggage from the contemplation of the structures of consciousness. The types of phenomenology most useful to us are those, like Edmund Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ and certain types of Buddhist psychology, that provide methods and training for attaining skill in mature contemplation.” [Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop, “Continuity, Causation And Cyclicity: A Cultural Neurophenomenology Of Time-Consciousness.” Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. Volume 1, number 2, July 2008. Pages 159-186.]

“Central to neurophenomenology is the combination of quantitative measures of large-scale neural activity with detailed first-person descriptions of the categorical features of experience. Accordingly, as a guide for their neurodynamic analysis, the authors focus on the role of integrative neural mechanisms such as neural phase synchrony in epileptic seizures, and on the collection of refined first-person descriptions of preictal states.” [Antoine Lutz, “Neurophenomenology and the study of self-consciousness.” Consciousness and Cognition. Volume 16, issue 34, September 2007. Pages 765-767.]

“In the late 1960s, the struggle for human freedom by African Americans gave rise to the call for black sociology. This intellectual movement was an effort to redirect the production of sociological knowledge toward elevating the group status of African Americans. The intent was to rescue sociology in particular and social science in general from their complicity in the construction and reproduction of systemic white supremacy racism. Despite these early efforts, black sociology has not realized its potential. This arrested development is largely the result of the societal conditions that initially made the call for black sociology historically necessary. The racism of systemic white supremacy—particularly its normative manifestations—routinely subverts countervailing social formations. This process for African Americans and other groups (for example, Native Americans …) who have similar historical experiences is related to the metaproblem of cultural hegemony, or the systemic negation of one culture by another …. Sociologically, the historical imperative that emerges from this relationship is the need to address processes of institutional destabilization that constrain group survival, elevation, and liberation. For Africa Americans and other African-descent populations, circumstances have made group existence a fundamental epistemological concern. Thus, this paper argues that black sociology is fundamentally existential sociology.” [Clovis E. Semmes, “Existential Sociology or the Sociology of Group Survival, Elevation, and Liberation.” Journal of African American Studies. Volume 7, number 4, March 2004. Pages 3-18.]

“The last ten years show signs indicative of the beginnings of a new creative epoch in sociology. A body of criticism directed toward the absolutistic sociologies has become increasingly focused and sharpened in its critical concerns; it is accompanied by a substantial corpus of empirical research and now is in the process of becoming more visible and available to the professional audience in monographs, edited collections and journal articles. Although a number of labels have been applied to this developing set of ideas, e.g., micro-organization, phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology, it will be referred to tentatively in this essay as ‘existential sociology.’ It characteristically is concerned with the position of man in the social world and in social theory; it considers theory and life to have an intimate and unavoidable connection; it sees the reality of human social life as situational; and it espouses a methodology that is grounded in the understandings of everyday life, rather than presupposed a priori. Existential sociology thus contains a specific perspective on man which is both implicit and explicit, a set of methodological presuppositions, and it manifests a view of social reality which specifically challenges the dominant views of sociology.” [Peter K. Manning, “Existential Sociology.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 14, number 2, spring 1973. Pages 200-225.]

“All told, rock ’n’ roll music and its derivatives arguably comprise the preeminent form of popular music in our society. The popular music industry that markets rock ’n’ roll continues to expand dramatically if not always economically—beyond multi-billion dollar annual sales, globalization, CDs, MP3 technology, and the Internet. The original generation of rock ’n’ rollers—the baby boomers—are now parents and, in increasing numbers, grandparents. The music and musical culture they grew up with has stayed with them, becoming the soundtrack of American culture. It is this context that provides the cultural and societal background for my analysis, which utilizes two related conceptual frameworks: phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology directs us to examine the situations in which authenticity in its various forms and iterations becomes relevant to the popular music fan in everyday life. Existential social thought directs us to examine the effects of these situations on the experience of self.” [Joseph A. Kotarba, “Pop Music as a Resource for Assembling an Authentic Self: A Phenomenological-Existential Perspective.” Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Phillip Vannini and Patrick Williams, editors. Burlington, Vermont; Ashgate Publishing Company. 2009. Pages 153-168.]

“Thinking of myself as a corpse created sadness, intrigue, and perplexity. But was this a truthful response? Could it have simply been the presentation of self-identity based in social construction and knowledge that other people would review it? Maybe a more honest response would have been less appropriate for this setting and too detrimental to my sense of self for consideration. Could it have been the response of an individual thinking about death from the safe confines of his home well away from the sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound or more concrete aspects of it? Possibly it was more representative of observations conducted from personal experience and the reading of published literature. How would an individual even know she or he was being deceitful about the self? These were the tasks of an existential sociology. Perhaps taking a job as an embalmer’s apprentice without experience in death related occupations might reveal substantive information about the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that occurred while working in contact with the dead, or it might reveal reasons why the public finds discussions of death, funeral directors, and the thought of being dead as morbid rather than as a natural process and necessary component of being human. The possibilities of this study were yet to be known.” [Meghan Daniel Probstfield. Becoming an Embalmer’s Apprentice: An Assessment and Application of Existential Sociology. Ph.D. dissertation. Oklahoma State University. Stillwater, Oklahoma. May, 2006. Page 11.]

“… a renewed interest in existential sociology owes itself to the Postmodern notion that as we realize our world, we realize ourselves. They would also question [George Herbert] Mead’s confidence that people will come together and labor effectively to solve social problems. Critiques of Mead’s theories often converge on his ideological presuppositions. Among suspicion is the manner in which he teleologically privileges his theories by looking solely at the end results. The contradiction is this: if all ideas evolve in a process, then how can the consequences of a theoiy be definitely predicted?” [Chris L. Jakway. A Kierkegaardian Understanding of Self and Society: An Existential Sociology. Ph.D. dissertation. Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, Michigan. June, 1998. Page 15.]

“Existential sociology emerged in the late 1970s as the most recent version of everyday life sociology. Writers in this perspective have attempted to integrate symbolic interaction ism’s powerful concepts of the self and the situation, phenomenological sociology’s emphasis on the social construction of reality, and ethnomethodology’s telling critique of conventional sociological theory and methods, with an innovative argument for the centrality of embodiment and feelings to human agency. Thus, existential sociology can be defined descriptively as the study of human experience in the world (or existence) in all its forms. A key feature of experience in the (contemporary) world is change.” [Joseph A. Kotarba, “existential sociology.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. George Ritzer, editor. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007. Pages 1519-1524.]

“Existential sociology has posed what is said to be a radical alternative to present-day theory, and it has done so with the added claim that the theoretical alternative which it represents is, without question, the only viable one with which sociologists should be properly concerned. Proponents of the new sociology assert that it is engaged in an effort to explicate the most fundamental features of social life, and that until such time as this foundational analysis is completed ‘all further sociological inquiry will be useless.’ …

“Existential sociology has emerged out of the presumed disjunction between the prevailing modes of cognizing social reality and the sensibilities of those to whom the experience of that reality is no longer synchronized with the ‘offical interpretation.’ It is, in this regard, thoroughly invested with a rebel vision and thus demonstrates a close association with the motives of ‘radical sociology.’ …

“… existential sociology has formulated a vision of conventional theory which is both thoroughly totalistic and unimaginably inaccurate. Contemporary sociological theory is, in fact, neither uniform in its assumptions nor dominated by any single prevailing paradigm. The failure of existential sociology to recognize this, although undoubtedly motivated by the need of those who are engaged in elaborating any new and relatively novel theoretical approach to legitimate and make explicit their enterprise, has eventuated in a large and seemingly unbridge- able gulf between existential and conventional sociology.”

[Robert W. Bogart, “A Critique of Existential Sociology.” Social Research. Volume 44, number 3, autumn 1977. Pages 502-528.]

“Because phenomena, as understood phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up Being, while Being is in every case the Being of some entity, we must first bring forward the entities themselves if it is our aim that Being should be laid bare; and we must do this in the right way. These entities must likewise show themselves with the kind of access which genuinely belongs to them. And in this way the ordinary conception of phenomenon becomes phenomenologically relevant. If our analysis is to be authentic, its aim is such that the prior task of assuring ourselves ‘phenomenologically’ of that entity which is to serve as our example, has already been prescribed as our point of departure.” [Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, translators. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1962. Page 61.]

“I remained so fascinated by [Edmund] Husserl’s work that I read in it again and again in the years to follow without gaining sufficient insight into what fascinated me. The spell emanating from the work extended to the outer appearance of the sentence structure and the title page.…

“… circumstances forced me to delve into Husserl’s work anew. However, my repeated beginning also remained unsatisfactory, because I couldn't get over a main difficulty. It concerned the simple question how thinking’s manner of procedure which called itself ‘phenomenology’ was to be carried out. What worried me about this question came from the ambiguity which Husserl’s work showed at first glance.”

[Martin Heidegger. On Being and Time. Joan Stambaugh, translator. New York: Harper Torchbooks imprint of Harper & Row, Publishers. 1972. Pages 75-76.]

“This article is to be considered not as an apologetics of Heidegger and even analysis of his ideas. This is more the sketches of a regionalistics following from, firstly, existential phenomenology, secondly, ethical considerations, thirdly, cultural philosophy, fourthly, existential historics.” [Tomas Kačerauskas, “Death in the perspective of existential phenomenology.” Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication. Volume 17, number 3, 2009. Pages 83-91.]

“Traditional solutions to the problem of other minds, like the argument from analogy, get entangled in the conceptual problem of other minds because they naively presuppose that others, whose mental states one cannot access, can at least be understood as others like oneself. The varieties of existential phenomenology considered so far get entangled in a comparable conceptual problem. This is not because they naively assume that others are others like oneself. In making situatedness and embodiment central for their understanding of subjects, they argue explicitly that self and other are not isolated from each other in the first place. Rather, they get caught up in this problem because they assume without further argument that situated or embodied subjects are individuated as self and other.” [Christian Skirke, “Existential Phenomenology and the Conceptual Problem of Other Minds.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Volume 52, issue, 2 June 2014. Pages 227-249.]

“The vitalizing connection between mindfulness meditation and sociocultural contexts has yet to be articulated in a practically and philosophically grounded manner across the rich landscape of contemporary humanistic and existential phenomenological psychotherapy approaches. In this article, we begin to explore how and why an emerging mindful and multicultural humanistic-existential psychotherapy (MMHEP) approach can serve as a clearing for boundless mindful awareness that can open onto meaningful meditation upon multifaceted cultural and contextual horizons—revelatory edge horizons that speak to the poignant significance of culturally situated experiences carried forward in the life-giving breath of countless present moments. By reuniting the landscape of ‘inward’ possibilities for bare and present moment mindfulness with the meditative awareness of ‘outer’ sociocultural realms, a client may integratively connect with a greater sense of wholeness as a sociocultural-being-in-the-world. In addition, for the MMHEP psychotherapist, this article’s examination of an existential phenomenological and humanistic canon of primary texts can open the way for freely grounding MMHEP in writings that prefigured the cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) mindfulness-based third wave.” [Andrew J. Felder and Brent Dean Robbins, “The Integrated Heart of Cultural and Mindfulness Meditation Practice in Existential Phenomenology and Humanistic Psychotherapy.” The Humanistic Psychologist. Volume 44, number 2, June 2016. Pages 105-126.]

“This article develops an existential-phenomenological critique of the social constructionist movement in psychology, taking its lead from what Kenneth Gergen calls “the most pressing question”: What happens to us when we begin to employ constructionist ideas in our lives? It is suggested that contemporary consumer societies already work according to the logic of social construction and that constructionism already has become many people’s philosophy.…

“… my argument has not been that we should abandon social constructionism completely but rather that it stands in need of being supplemented with the insights into human existential facticity and finitude that we have found in existential-phenomenological descriptions.”

[Svend Brinkmann, “Questioning Constuctionism: Toward an Ethics of Finitude.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 46, number 1, January 2006. Pages 92-111.]

“… [Martin] Heidegger has enormous difficulty in deciding just what these decisive stages are. The problem is how there can be a definitive account of such a history, rather than several competing ones, depending on the stance from which the history is constructed. The account offered of the ‘end of philosophy’ also becomes important here; for one interpretation of that end would license a definitive history of philosophy, as cumulatively leading to that end. This would be a Hegelian account, retaining uncritically an Aristotelian notion of essence as given at the beginning of time and realised at the end of a given process of development. While this conception maps closely onto the dynamics of natural growth, as in plants and even human beings, it does not capture the processes at work in technologically constructed processes. Heidegger’s use of Husserlian phenomenological reduction and of the Husserlian conception of essence as that which is constructed through phenomenological and eidetic reduction releases his thinking about history from such Aristotelian and Hegelian essentialism. It permits Heidegger to sidestep [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s monumental struggle to demonstrate a contiguity between events and conceptual structure, such that systematic connections between all things can be posited and observed.” [Joanna Hodge. Heidegger and ethics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Page 147.]

“[Martin] Heidegger’s existential ontology has greatly influenced existential psychiatry and psychotherapy, yet opinions about the psychotherapeutic utility of an ontological perspective remain divided, especially in light of Heidegger’s negative reactions to misappropriation of his ontological analysis.…

“Within the existential movement, the primary philosophical source for understanding human lives has always been Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontological analysis of human existence, which he characterizes as temporal, historical, thoroughly relational Being-in-the-world and Being-with as Being-with-one-another. To give this relational Being-in-the-world a proper name, Heidegger adopted the German term Dasein (existence, being-there, presence).”

[Angela M. D. Tratter, “A Place for Existential Ontology?: Emblems of Being and Implicit World-Projection.” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology. Volume 22, number 2, June 2015. Pages 133-146.]

“The phenomenological part of [Martin] Heidegger’s corpus—as opposed to his ‘postmetaphysical’ musings—argued that the metaphysical tradition had diverted thought from the everyday richness of primordial spatiality and primordial ecstatic temporality into a primary concern for an unspatial, nontemporal abstract eternity. In the process, the metaphysical tradition lowered the truth status of poetry, religion, statesmanship, art, and thinking vis à vis metaphysical thinking and logic, and ultimately vis à vis modern mathematical, technological science.” [Gregory Bruce Smith, “What Is Political Philosophy? A Phenomenological View.” Perspectives on Political Science. Volume 36, number 2, spring 2007. Pages 91-102.]

“They [left and right] are directions of the directedness into a world that because of its horizonality is always already transcendent. Thus considered, left and right are directions of the spatiality that belongs to the ‘transcendence of the world.’ …

“The difference between both types of spatiality reflects to a certain extent the onticoontological difference since the spatiality of the ready-to-hand within-the-world can be established by a purely ‘ontic observation’ whereas the spatiality of being-in-the-world requires an ontological reflection upon the transcendence of the world. In this regard, [Martin] Heidegger goes on to lay the claim that the spatiality of being-in-the-world (as related to the transcendence of the world) provides the ontic possibility of Dasein’s [existence’s] environmental encountering of the readiness-to-hand. (This spatiality is generated by the ‘ worldhood of the world.’ … But there is a worldhood because the world is transcendent.) I will use the expression of ‘ existential spatiality’ for designating in the first place the dynamic unity of both types of spatiality in the process of meaning constitution.”

[Dimitri Ginev, “The Scope of Existential Spatiality.” Santalka. Volume 18, number 3, September 2010. Pages 18-30.]

“With the ontological turn that our hermeneutical inquiry has taken, we are moving toward a metaphysical idea whose significance we can show by going back to its origins. The concept of the beautiful—which shared the central place in eighteenth-century aesthetics with the sublime, and which was to be entirely eliminated in the course of the nineteenth century by the aesthetic critique of classicism—was once a universal metaphysical concept and had a function in metaphysics, the universal doctrine of being, that was by no means limited to the aesthetic in the narrower sense. We will see that this ancient conception of the beautiful can also be of service to the comprehensive hermeneutics that has emerged from the critique of the methodologism of the human sciences.” [Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. Second, revised edition. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, translators. London and New York: Continuum. 2004. Page 472.]

“… the metaphysics of the beautiful has implications for our inquiry. Now it is no longer a question, as it seemed in the nineteenth century, of justifying the truth claim of art and the artistic, or even that of history and the methodology of the human sciences, in terms of theory of science. Now we are concerned, rather, with the much more general task of establishing the ontological background of the hermeneutical experience of the world.” [Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. Second, revised edition. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, translators. London and New York: Continuum. 2004. Pages 478-479.]

“If we start from the basic ontological view that being is language—i.e., self-presentation—as revealed to us by the hermeneutical experience of being, then there follows not only the event-character of the beautiful and the event-structure of all understanding. Just as the mode of being of the beautiful proved to be characteristic of being in general, so the same thing can be shown to be true of the concept of truth. We can start from the metaphysical tradition, but here too we must ask what aspects of it apply to hermeneutical experience.” [Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. Second, revised edition. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, translators. London and New York: Continuum. 2004. Page 481.]

“… the science of hermeneutics would have us believe that the opinion we have to understand is something alien that seeks to lure us into misunderstanding, and our task is to exclude every element through which a misunderstanding can creep in. We accomplish this task by a controlled procedure of historical training, by historical criticism, and by a controllable method in connection with powers of psychological empathy. It seems to me that this description is valid in one respect, but yet it is only a partial description of a comprehensive life-phenomenon that c onstitutes the ‘we’ that we all are. Our task, it seems to me, is to transcend the prejudices that underlie the aesthetic consciousness, the historical consciousness, and the hermeneutical consciousness that has been restricted to a technique for avoiding misunderstandings and to overcome the alienations present in them all.” [Hans-Georg Gadamer. Philosophical Hermeneutics. David E. Linge, translator and editor. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1976. Page 8.]

“… [Based upon] the way in which the themes of circularity, temporality, and fore-meaning underlie the Heideggerian/Gadamerian response to traditional dualistic epistemological approaches, I an now in a position to focus my explication of the unique claims of [Hans-Georg] Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics. In this first section, I detail Gadamer’s ontology of reason, and how this drives his resuscitation of prejudice, tradition, and authority as necessary components within the hermeneutic process. Gadamer’s hermeneutics stands in contrast with the Enlightenment view which considered these as impediments to true understanding. While Gadamer does not deny that a particular prejudice, tradition, or authority may play a distorting role, he aims to show how, in general, the process of understanding relies on prejudice, tradition, and authority—that these concepts are not inherently distorting. Although ‘prejudice’ is commonly used to refer to a belief that is unfounded, Gadamer wants to change the negative connotations we attach to the word. His ontological emphasis maintains there can be no understanding without prejudices.” [Lauren Swayne Barthold. Prejudice and Understanding: Gadamer’s Ontological Hermeneutics. M.A. thesis. Simon Fraser University. Burnaby, British Columbia. August, 1996. Pages 37-38.]

“It was Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method that brings hermeneutics into the heart of philosophy.…

“Love itself is a life-giving activity. It is in this sense that Cheng Yi [Chinese, 程颐, Chéng-Yí] claims that ‘there is no difference between sages and Dao [Chinese, 道, dào, “way” or “path”],’ because a sage is but the person of Dao and ‘whoever follows Dao thoroughly is a sage.’ So ultimately, the Dao carried by the classics is the Dao, the ultimate reality of the universe. It is in this sense that Cheng Yi’s claim that the classics are carriers of Dao is not merely a hermeneutic claim but also an ontological claim; more appropriately, it is an ontological–hermeneutic claim.”

[Yong Huang, “Cheng Yi’ Neo-Confucian Ontological Hermeneutics of Dao.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy. Volume 27, number 1, March 2000. Pages 69-92.]

“[The] work of interpretation is too rapid, when we hear our own language, to allow us time to decompose it into its different phases. But we have the clear consciousness of it when we converse in a foreign language which we know only imperfectly. We realize, then, that the sounds distinctly heard are being used by us as guiding marks, that we jump at once to a certain class of abstract ideas, and that, when we have adopted this intellectual tone, we advance with the conceived meaning, to meet the perceived sound. If the interpretation is to be exact, the one must be able to join the other.

“Indeed, would interpretation be possible if we had to go from words to ideas? The words of a sentence have not an absolute meaning. Each of them borrows a special import from what precedes it and from what follows it. Nor are all the words of a sentence capable of evoking an independent image or idea. Many of them express relations, and express them only by their place in the whole and by their connexion with the other words of the sentence. Had the mind con stantly to go from the word to the idea, it would be always perplexed and, so to say, wandering. Intellection can only be straight and sure if we set out from the supposed meaning, constructed by us hypothetically, then descend from the meaning to the fragments of words really perceived, and then make use of these as simple stakes to peg out in all its sinuosities the special curve of the road which the mind is to follow.…

“The intellectual effort to interpret, to comprehend, to pay attention, is then a movement of the ‘dynamic scheme’ in the direction of the image which develops it. It is a continuous transformation of abstract relations, suggested by the objects perceived, into concrete images capable of recovering those objects. No doubt a feeling of effort does not always intervene during this operation. We shall see presently in what particular circumstances the operation takes place whenever an effort is to be found accompanying it. But it is only during such an operation that we can become conscious of an intellectual effort.”

[Henri Bergson, “Intellectual Effort,” in Henri Bergson. Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays. H. Wildon Carr, translator. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1920. Pages 186-230.]

“… [There was] the 1902 article which first presents [Henri] Bergson’s ontological hermeneutics. Entitled ‘Intellectual Effort,‘ the article starts as a fairly pedestrian scrutiny of the then-current notion of the association of ideas, and more ‘active’ methods of cognition, such as ‘invention.’ Bergson uses the term ‘image’ to indicate an immediate, direct ‘finding’ which is more ‘mental’ than raw sensation, but less than an ‘act’ of cognitive apprehension. Roughly, ‘images’ are the ‘raw material’ of ‘intellectual effort.’ Being ‘raw material,’ the incipient ‘parts,’ the images need to be shaped, organized. To be ‘fitted’ and ‘placed,’ the images require a ‘scheme,’ or an abstract framework. Bergson’s article appears to grant a quasi-Kantian preeminence to the scheme – at least, at first. But as the article proceeds, he veers toward the realization that both ‘poles’ of the ‘effort’ – the concrete content of the images and the initial framing concept – must reciprocally adjust to each other. Bergson seemingly walked into the middle of the hermeneutic circle.” [Richard L. Brougham, “Ontological Hermeneutics: An Overlooked Bergsonian Perspective.” Process Studies. Volume 22, number 1, spring 1993. Pages 37-41.]

“At the beginning of our investigation it is not possible to give a detailed account of the presuppositions and prejudices which are constantly reimplanting and fostering the belief that an inquiry into Being is unnecessary. They are rooted in ancient ontology itself, and it will not be possible to interpret that ontology adequately until the question of Being has been clarified and answered and taken as a clue—at least, if we are to have regard for the soil from which the basic ontological concepts developed, and if we are to see whether the categories have been demonstrated in a way that is appropriate and complete. We shall therefore carry the discussion of these presuppositions only to the point at which the necessity for restating the question about the meaning of Being become plain.” [Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, tranlators. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1962. Pages 21-22.]

“… the word ‘hermeneutics,’ broadened in the appropriate sense, can mean the theory and methodology for every kind of interpretation, including, for example, that of works of the visual arts.…

“… In Being and Time, the term ‘hermeneutics’ is used in a still broader sense, ‘broader’ here meaning, however, not the mere extension of the same meaning over a still larger area of appplication. ‘Broader’ is to say: in keeping with that vastness which springs from originary being. In Being and Time, hermeneutics means neither the theory of the art of interpretation nor interpretation itself, but rather the attempt first of all to define the nature of interpretation on hermeneutic grounds.…

[Martin Heidegger. On the Way to Language. Peter D. Hertz, translator. New York: Perennial Library imprint of Harper & Row, Publishers. 1971. Page 11.]

“The study attempted to clarify the concept of care in male nurse work within the acute hospital setting. It consisted of semi-structured interviews with eight participants from a range of acute general hospital areas. A qualitative research process using ontological hermeneutics was selected as it provided a means through which the experiences of these men could be described and interpreted. The hermeneutic circle of fore-understanding, coconstitution and interpretation was followed ….

“… In ontological hermeneutics, sometimes referred to as Heideggerian or hermeneutic phenomenology …, a circle is followed to facilitate analysis that acknowledges what is known as the ontological shift as described by [Martin] Heidegger ….”

[Frank Milligan, “The concept of care in male nurse work: an ontological hermeneutic study in acute hospitals.” Journal of Advanced Nursing. Volume 35, number 1, July 2001. Pages 7-16.]

“The collection and analysis of data in the Heideggerian hermeneutic study that was conducted are informed by the philosophies of Heidegger, which presupposed that people are subjective and ‘self-interpreting’ beings and human experience is essentially meaningful in terms of the context in which people find themselves.…

“Ontological hermeneutics certainly merit being in the heart of mental-health nursing research because of it’s strong philosophical assumption that in order to bring in what is unintelligible to understanding, the non-cognitive precondition of all understanding and the shared primordial understanding of the being of people needs to kick in before rational thinking.”

[Kam Hock Chang and Stephen Horrocks, “Is there a place for ontological hermeneutics in mental-health nursing research? A review of a hermeneutic study” International Journal of Nursing Practice. Volume 15, number 5, October 2008. Pages 383-390.]

“Although the term critical most often evokes thoughts of neo Marxist ‘critical theory,’ critical qualitative research is actually a hybrid and emergent form of inquiry. Calls for a critical social science …, a postimperialist science …, and indigenous research agendas … are attended to as research is constructed that would uncover the ways that social relations are shaped by ideology and such research explores how these relations can be altered. This type of research is embedded within the history of qualitative research that has resulted in a scholarly environment in which diverse voices and ways of living in the world have been heard and respected. Additionally, critical qualitative research draws from the range of theoretical perspectives that have challenged notions of universalist truth, have acknowledged the political and power orientations of human knowledge(s), and have fostered emer gent, activist orientations.” [Gaile S. Cannella, “critical qualitative research.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. George Ritzer, editor. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007. Pages 867-870.]

“A Power founded on Authority can, of course, use force; but if Authority engenders force, the latter can never, by definition, engender a political Authority.

“A theory of ‘political Power’ is therefore nothing other than a theory of Authority (that manifests itself in the political ‘sphere’) – more precisely, a (theoretical) application of the theory of Authority to Politics (that is to say, to the State). Also, in order to avoid any ambiguity, we shall replace the phrase ‘political Power’ with that of ‘political Authority.’

“By definition, every political Authority belongs en bloc to the State as such. But the State is a ‘conceptual’ entity that needs a (material) ‘concrete support’ in order to exist in the spatiotemporal world. This is how problems of the division and transmission of Authority emerge.”

[Alexandre Kojève. The Notion of Authority. Hager Weslati, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2014. Verso ebook edition.]

“The original French edition carries the title La notion de l’autorité. Though the English adaptation of the title conveys most of the title’s commonsensical meanings, several other interpretations might be given, most remarkable among which would be a sense of authority’s possession over its notion. Even if it is unclear whether this was Kojève’s intention, it provides one explanation as to why the chosen title wasn’t simply La notion d’autorité (a title that nonetheless mistakenly appears on several French-language websites). Moreover, the possibility of such an interpretation is quite significant, since authority would, in this case, be that which would have authority over its signifier, whether that means to author or to authorize it.” [Jorge Varela, “The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation).” Review article. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 199, September/October 2016. Pages 46-48.]

“Over time, I have noted an increasing shift in my motivation for travel from seeking superficial to more profound engagements with destinations. I now actively seek out dialogic experiences in the natural landscape and among the host culture in the places I visit. I am also drawn to sites—built and natural—which are associated with sacredness in the vernacular tradition (such as temples, mountains, and springs) where I seek to imaginatively enter ‘sacred space.’ For these personal and professional reasons, I have sought explanations for the transformative potential of travel with a view to using such insight more deliberatively in the practice of transformative education. Yet I am also aware that such efforts must be handled with caution, sensitivity and wisdom since the potential for negative unintentional consequences is significant.” [Alun David Morgan, “Journeys Into Transformation: Travel to An ‘Other’ Place as a Vehicle for Transformative Learning.” Journal of Transformative Education. Volume 8, number 4, October 2010. Pages 246-268.]

“… what I have called ‘critical criminology’ is marked by a profound shift in the interpretation of motives behind the actions of the agencies that deal with crime. Many writers, of course, had long been pointing out that the ‘criminal-processing system’ was often harsh and unfair, and, more specifically, that the poor and members of minority groups suffered from an acute disadvantage. Few criminologists, however, were willing to go so far as to claim that the system was inherently unjust.” [Gresham M. Sykes, “Criminology: The Rise of Critical Criminology.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Volume 65, issue 2, 1974. Pages 206-213.]

“The fundamental question of the field of study I call ‘social epistemology’ is the following: How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access to one an other’s activities? ….

“Without knowing anything else about the nature of social epistemology, you can already tell that it has a normative interest, namely, in arriving at a kind of optimal division of cognitive labor. In other words, words that only a Marxist or a positivist could truly love, the social epistemologist would like to be able to show how the products of our cognitive pursuits are affected by changing the social relations in which the knowledge producers stand to one another. As a result, the social epistemologist would be the ideal epistemic policy maker: if a certain kind of knowledge product is desired, then he could design a scheme for dividing up the labor that would likely (or efficiently) bring it about; or, if on independent value grounds the society is already committed to a certain scheme for dividing up the cognitive labor, the social epistemologist could then indicate the knowledge products that are likely to flow from that scheme.”

[Steve Fuller, “On Regulating What Is Known: A Way to Social Epistemology.” Synthese. Volume 73, number 1, October 1987. Pages 145-183.]

“Atheism is on the march—or so one might think from the mass media. Books by prominent atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, have been on best-seller lists for months. Yet as soon as one examines it, the so-called New Atheism appears to be a good deal less than it seems. Atheism should not be confused with secularism—it represents the extreme edge of a wide range of secular thinking and the numbers of atheists is not, nor ever has been, very large ….” [William A. Stahl. “One-Dimensional Rage: The Social Epistemology of the New Atheism and Fundamentalism.” Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal. Amarnath Amarasingam, editor. Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2010. Page 97.]

“Amarnath Amarasingam’s edited collection of essays, Religion and the New Atheism, reflects a general concern among many within the academic world not only that new atheism offers unsophisticated and uninformed analysis of religion but that there is a distinct lack of rigorous academic treatment of their ideas ….” [Jolyon Charles Leslie Agar, “Raging Against God: Examining the Radical Secularism and Humanism of ‘New Atheism.’” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 2, March 2012. Pages 225-246.]

“Any scientist who insists on imposing metaphysical naturalism is guilty of scientism. This involves usurping the boundary between science and religion and claiming all of reality for science. In essence, this would be a form of atheism imposed by fiat and a reconciliation of science ence and religion by eliminating religion as it is known by most people.” [William A. Stahl, Gary Diver, Yvonne Petry, and Gary Diver. Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 2002. Page 180.]

“New Atheism emerged in 2004 as a kind of literary and social movement. Led by such luminaries as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism became part of the zeitgeist, a well-timed reaction against religious fundamentalism. The New Atheists are notoriously pugilistic. In print or on stage, they never run from a fight.…

“But there’s something missing in their critiques, something fundamental. For all their eloquence, their arguments are often banal. Regrettably, they’ve shown little interest in understanding the religious compulsion. They talk incessantly about the untruth of religion because they assume truth is what matters most to religious people.… Religious convictions, in many cases, are held not because they’re true but because they’re meaningful, because they’re personally transformative. New Atheists are blind to this brand of belief.”

[Sean Illing, “New Atheism’s fatal arrogance: The glaring intellectual laziness of Bill Maher & Richard Dawkins.” Salon.com. May 9th, 2015. Retrieved on January 9th, 2016.]

“Critical ethnography is a relatively new mode of qualitative investigation and one in need of further elaboration, discussion, and debate. Critical ethnography shares the methods of traditional ethnography, such as by seeking the emic perspective gained through intense fieldwork, but it adds an explicit political focus. This focus places critical ethnography in a unique position to examine power-laden social and cultural processes within particular social sites. More specifically, critical ethnography can be defined as a research methodology through which social, cultural, political, and economic issues can be interpreted and represented to illustrate the processes of oppression and engage people in addressing them.” [Kay E. Cook, Critical Ethnography.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Lisa M. Given, editor. Thousand Oaks, California. SAGE Publications, 2008.]

“Critical Education Theory evolves from the wider discipline of Critical (Social) Theory, and looks at the ways in which political ideology shapes Education as a way of maintaining existing regimes of privilege and social control. It casts a critical eye upon the history, the development and practice of education and educational theorising. It holds that education in the modern western world is shaped by the ideologies and power structures that devolve from Capitalism, and that it’s purpose is to reproduce these conditions in ways which benefit the already-powerful. Instead, Critical Education Theory promotes an ideology of education as an instrument of social transformation and as a means of attaining social, cultural, and economic equity. Initially, it did this from an orthodox (economic) Marxist point of view, but increasingly has adopted many of the tenets and theories of Cultural Studies to demonstrate how cultural codes play a fundamental part in both curriculum construction and classroom practice.” [Tony Ward, “Critical Education Theory.” Tony Edward Education: Education for Critical Times. No date. Retrieved on August 25th, 2015.]

“… the new form of interactionism, which I … have … labeled as ‘radical ineractionism,’ is needed. Unlike [Herbert] Blumer’s … ‘symbolic interactionism,’ radical interactionism gives more gravity to [Robert] Park’s than to [George Herbert] Mead’s ideas and, in the process, makes domination rather than sociality the foundation of human social existence. Although my hope is that my colleagues will consider radical interactionism as a viable alternative to symbolic interactionism, I am pessimistic about the chances of this happening any time soon because intellectual pursuits are no less subject to the operation of dominance orders than any other kind of human social endeavor ….” [Lonnie Athens, “The Roots of ‘Radical Interactionism.’” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 39, issue 4, 2009. Pages 387-414.]

“In my paper on human subordination, I hope to increase our present understanding of it by not only drawing on the insights of [George Herbert] Mead and [Herbert] Blumer, but also, more importantly, those of [Robert] Park. By building directly on their thoughts, I will seek to explain how subordination operates in human group life from the interactionist’s perspective, which I have elsewhere labeled ‘radical interactionism‘ …. My view of subordination is commensurate with present-day common usage. According to the 4th edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the word ‘subordination’ means ‘subordinating or being subordinated’ and its derivative, ‘subordinate,’ means ‘inferior to or placed below another in rank.’ Since the placement of people or groups into subordinate roles requires domination and since domination requires, in turn, the exercise of power and sometimes even force, subordination is broadly conceived from this perspective as encompassing not only the operation of domination, but also both power and force.” [Lonnie Athens, “Human Subordination from a Radical Interactionist’s Perspective.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 40, issue 3, 2010. Pages 339-368.]

“[George Herbert] Mead blundered when he failed to develop a radical interactionist’s perspective and make domination the key to our understanding of social conflict. Despite this blunder, we owe him a great debt for forcing us to consider adopting a new more radical interactionism as replacement for his much older and more conventional counterpart, symbolic interactionism, if we wish to increase our understanding not only social conflict, but also social existence ….” [Lonnie Athens, “Mead’s Analysis of Social Conflict: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique.” The American Sociologist. Volume 43, number 4, December 2012. Pages 428-447.]

“… I hope to accomplish my ultimate goal of laying the foundation for a new form of interactionism: radical interactionism. In trying to achieve these three goals, I will proceed as follows. First, I will try to demonstrate how his shortchanging of domination thwarts his answering of these four vital questions that he poses about society: (1) What is the nature of the master principle on which institutions and, in turn, societies operate? (2) How did human institutions and, in turn, human societies originally arise? (3) How do human societies change through the modification of their basic institutions? (4) How do institutions operate in everyday life to organize human communal existence? Next, I will seek to demonstrate … [the substitution of] my notion of the principle of domination for [George Herbert] Mead’s principle of sociality ….” [Lonnie Athens, “Radical Interactionism: Going Beyond Mead.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 37, issue 2, 2007. Pages 137-165.]

“He [Herbert Blumer] wrongly infers the absence of dominance in a social act on the basis of whether the participants acquiesce to it. According to this reasoning, if no one openly challenges another’s domination of an unfolding social act, then dominance cannot be said to be an effective factor in its construction. However, during the construction of any complex social act, different people must perform different roles to ensure its completion, so a division of labor invariably emerges. The emergence of a division of labor requires that superordinate roles become differentiated from subordinate ones, and thereby, the need for dominance always emerges.” [Lonnie Athens, “‘Domination’: The Blind Spot in Mead’s Analysis of the Social Act.” Journal of Classical Sociology. Volume 2, number 1, 2002. Pages 25-42.]

“Although contemporary interactionists have generally overlooked the notion of dominance, [Robert E.] Park … emphasized it. In fact, dominance should play the same critical part in symbolic interactionist’s thought that ‘social class’ and ‘social status’ play, respectively, in Marxism and functionalism.” [Lonnie Athens, “Dominance, Ghettos, and Violent Crime.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 39, number 4, autumn 1998. Pages 673-691.]

“To his credit, [Herbert] Blumer … makes society one of the fundamental categories, or what he calls ‘root images’ of ‘symbolic interactionism,’ the theoretical perspective that he developed primarily from his study of [George Herbert] Mead’s thought.” [Lonnie Athens, “Mead’s Lost Conception of Society.” Symbolic Interaction. Volume 28, number 3, summer 2005. Pages 305-325.]

“… [The] narrowing of the focus of public attention tends to increase the influence of the dominant person or persons in the community. But the existence of this dominance depends upon the ability of the community, or its leaders, to maintain tension. It is in this way that dictators arise and maintain themselves in power. It is this that explains likewise the necessity to a dictatorship of some sort of censorship.

“News circulates, it seems, only in a society where there is a certain degree of rapport and a certain degree of tension. But the effect of news from outside the circle of public interest is to disperse attention and, by so doing, to encourage individuals to act on their own initia- tive rather than on that of a dominant party or personality.”

[Robert E. Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 45, number 5 March 1940. Pages 669-686.]

“Human ecology, as sociologists conceive it, seeks to emphasize not so much geography as space. In society we not only live together but at the same time we live apart, and human relations can always be reckoned, with more or less accuracy, in terms of distance. In so far as social structure can be defined in terms of position, social changes may be described in terms of movement; and society exhibits, in one of its aspects, characters that can be measured and described in mathematical formulas.

“Local communities may be compared with reference to the areas which they occupy and with reference to the relative density of population distribution within those areas. Communities are not, however, mere population aggregates. Cities, particularly great cities, where the selection and segregation of the population has gone farthest, display certain morphological characteristics which are not found in smaller population aggregates.”

[Robert Ezra Park. Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press. 1952. Page 166.]

“The thing which distinguishes an organism from a mere aggregation of individuals, or of parts, is the capacity for concerted action—the disposition of the parts, under certain conditions, to act as a unit. The structure of an organism, inherited or acquired, serves to facilitate this concerted action. This is as true of a social as of a biological organism. The fundamental differences between organisms, the character which permits us to arrange them in a progressive series, are the different degrees to which the different parts of which they are composed have been integrated and organized for the purpose of corporate action.” [Robert E. Park, “Human Nature and Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 32, number 5, March 1927. Pages 733-741.]

“[George Herbert] Mead’s concern was predominatly with symbolic interaction. Symbolic interaction involves interpretation, or ascertaining the meaning of the actions or remarks of the other person, and definition, or conveying indications to another person as to how he is to act. Human association consists of a process of such interpretation and definition. Through this process the participants fit their own acts to the ongoing acts of one another and guide others in doing so.” [Herbert Blumer, “Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 71, number 5, March 1966. Pages 535-544.]

“Henceforth, we shall use the label ‘symbolic interaction’ to refer to the type of interaction that makes use of significant gestures or symbols. We shall use the term ‘nonsymbolic interaction’ to cover the type of interaction [George Herbert] Mead treats as the ‘conversation of gestures.’ Several matters pertaining to the distinction between these two types of interaction may be inserted at this point. First, one should keep in mind the fact that nonsymbolic interaction, while typical of animal societies, also takes place in the association of human beings.…

“Second, it should be borne in mind that nonsymbolic interaction is not restricted to human behavior.…

“Third, in line with this discussion, it should be noted that the process of ‘learning’ through nonsymbolic interaction is very different indeed from the process of learning through symbolic interaction.”

[Herbert Blumer. George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct. Thomas J. Morrione, editor. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2004. Pages 22-23.]

“Methodologically, the interactionist approach forces the sociologist out of the armchair; no theory can be based upon universal principles of human nature derived from a philosophy of history. All concrete and social facts must be comprehended as manufacturing the drama of human interactions in a particular human setting. Because the actor’s personal motives and intentions are central to understanding the social action, the method [from Charles Horton Cooley] of ‘sympathetic introspection’ becomes an indispensible tool for the sociologist.…

“The movement toward psychological sociology, while still nominalistic, marked a monumental advance in Americal social theory. The social forces school died and was buried unceremoniously along with its proponents. Today the names of [Lester Frank] Ward, [Edward A.] Ross, [Franklin Henry] Giddings, and [Albion] Small are little more than historical footnotes. By contrast, not only has the interactionist school survived, but new strains have also appeared under such names as ‘existential’ sociology, ‘phenomenological’ sociology, ‘humanistic’ sociology, and ‘dramaturgical’ sociology. Moreover, some early proponents, such as Cooley and [Herbert] Blumer, are still widely read.”

[J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith. American Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 1980. Pages 158.]

“The ‘Social Forces’ School. The first approach, though mainly of historic interest, is still followed by certain sociologists. This is the view that all social phenomena can be regarded as manifestations of some homogeneous force or forces. The imitation theory, developed principally by [Gabriel] Tarde and [Edward A.] Ross, is an illustration which is too well known to require discussion. A number of writers have taken certain alleged ‘instincts’ as forces universally operative in society; for example, fear, hate, gregariousness, suggestibility, and parental love. We are not here referring to the instinct school of social psychologists who trace the basis of social facts in the specific instinctive behavior of individuals. We mean rather those sociologists who abstract, the categories of instinct from specific individuals and consider them upon the generalized plane of a ‘social force.’” [Floyd H. Allport, “The Present Status of Social Psychology.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. Volume 21, Issue 4, 1927. Pages 372-383.]

“Critical interactionism (CI), as I conceive it, focuses primarily on understanding social activity—what people do in concrete instances of social life….

“I use the term ‘interactionism’ to refer to the wide diversity of analytic approaches which have developed to examine social activity, particularly in the last 50 years, including symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, Goffman’s dramaturgy and frame analysis, discursive psychology, interpretive interactionism, institutional ethnography.

“Interactionisms typically focus on the nature of social interaction, interpretive procedures, and use of language. They also tend to examine people interacting together to organize their lives and assemble society, what symbolic interactionists call ‘joint actions.’”

[Wayne Martin Mellinger, “Critical Interactionism: The Microsociology of Domination.” Doing Modernity (blog). May 26th, 2008. Retrieved on August 14th, 2015.

“A critical dramaturgical analysis of humor … can demonstrate the incongruity between logic, official norms, and forms of behavior by showing how ‘in jokes people frequently play with meanings in order to create humor [… and] to change the normalcy of the situation.’ … When a comic discourse pokes through the thin sleeve of institutionalized reality and focuses on the incongruities between official rules and actual behavior, the basis for social critique is laid.” [Paul Paolucci with Margaret Richardson, “Dramaturgy, humor, and criticism: How Goffman reveais Seinfeld’s critique of American culture.” Humor. Volume 19, number 1, 2006. Pages 27-52.]

“A critical dramaturgy would examine how the power of social institutions and norms of interaction can limit and manipulate actors, even if the ‘utter banality of this coercion renders it nearly invisible to our awareness’ …. Like [Erving] Goffman, Seinfeld [a U.S. television series from 1989 to 1998] unites macro and micro levels by revealing gaps between official norms and strategies actors use in negotiating modern, everyday situations. Scrutinizing standard rules of conduct in mundane everyday situations can expose the contradictoriness and arbitrariness of institutionalized rules. Seinfeld, as a result, shows how actors are compelled to use impression management in their relationships to avoid delegitimizing evaluations while they pursue their base drives. By making its characters and their imperfections ‘especially endearing’ …, this strategy cultivates a sympathetic audience. While other humorists target undiscussed aspects of reality, few do so as dramaturgically as Jerry Seinfeld. Showing how his program’s content is both dramaturgical and critical can animate Goffman’s technical surface posture and reveal his work’s critical capacity.’ [Paul Paolucci with Margaret Richardson, “Sociology of Humor and a Critical Dramaturgy.” Symbolic Interaction. Volume 29, number 3, summer 2006. Pages 331-348.]

“It seems to me that the dramaturgical approach may constitute a fifth perspective, to be added to the technical, political, structural, and cultural perspectives. The dramaturgical perspective, like each of the other four, can be employed as the end-point of analysis, as a final way of ordering facts. This would lead us to describe the techniques of impression management employed in a given establishment, the principal problems of impression management in the establishment, and the identity and interrelationships of the several performance teams which operate in the establishment. But, as with the facts utilized in each of the other perspectives, the facts specifically pertaining to impression management also play a part in the matters that are a concern in all the other perspectives. It may be useful to illustrate this briefly.” [Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books imprint of Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1959. Pages 240-241.]

“The opportunity for political change presented by the independence referendum and the surrounding debate opened up political and policy space to explore and bring forward alternative approaches to social security for a future Scotland and as a response to the ‘welfare reform’ actions of the UK government. Using evidence from a range of sources produced during and since the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, this article draws on concepts from feminist critical frame analysis … in discussing the extent to which there was any ‘grand vision for gender equality’ ….” [Angela O’Hagan, “Redefining welfare in Scotland – with or without women?” Critical Social Policy. Volume 36, number 4, November 2016. Pages 649-671.]

“One of the potentials of critical frame analysis is that it exposes the ‘conceptual prejudices’ that unintentionally may shape policy discourses; consequently, it can reveal latent inconsistencies, or even gender bias, embedded in the design of public policies.” [Mieke Verloo and Emanuela Lombardo. Contested Gender Equality and Policy Variety in Europe: Introducing a Critical Frame Analysis Approach. No date. Retrieved on August 23rd, 2015.

“The frame analysis approach adopted in this study is both constructionist and deconstructionist …. It is rooted in an understanding of policy problems as being constructed, as based upon competing interpretations of what is the problem, and on the recognition that policy solutions are in-built in the representation of the problem …. In its methodology for mapping the different representations of gender in/equality as a policy problem, it adopts a deconstructionist approach. First of all, it treats ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender inequality’ as an empty signifier, studying it as an open concept that can be filled with a multitude of meanings. Also, its ‘sensitising questions’ do not present an absolute norm against which policies are measured, but it allows for a ‘relative’ norm ….” [María Bustelo and Mieke Verloo. Exploring the possibilities of Critical Frame Analysis for evaluating policies. A paper to be delivered at the International Political Science Association World Congress, Fukuoka, 2006. Page 16. Retrieved on August 23rd, 2015.]

“… the first step of frame analysis has to be the identification/construction of issue frames. The framing of policy issues by particular policy actors or in particular policy documents can be analyzed with reference to how it combines various issues frames. Metaframes can be analyzed by finding common normative claims in issue frames belonging to different policy issues. Thus finding issue frames is a crucial intermediary step both for the analysis of metaframes and for the analysis of framing processes in specific documents.” [Tamas Dombos. “Critical Frame Analysis: A Comparative Methodology for the ‘Quality in Gender+ Equality Policies’ (QUING) project.” Center for Policy Studies. January, 2009. Page 6. Retrieved on August 23rd, 2015.]

“My aim is to try to isolate some of the basic frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of events and to analyze the special vulnerabilities to which these frames of reference are subject. I start with the fact that from an individual’s particular point of view, while one thing may momentarily appear to be what is really going on, in fact what is actually happening is plainly a joke, or a dream, or an accident, or a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or a deception, or a theatrical performance, and so forth. And attention will be directed to what it is about our sense of what is going on that makes it so vulnerable to the need for these various rereadings.…

“And of course much use will be made of [Gregory] Bateson’s use of the term ‘frame.’ I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. That is my definition of frame. My phrase ‘frame analysis’ is a slogan to refer to the examination in these terms of the organization of experience.”

[Erving Goffman. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, Massachusetts: Northeastern University Press. 1986. Pages 10-11.]

“Psychological frames are inclusive, i.e., by excluding certain messages certain others are included. From the point of view of set theory these two functions are synonymous, but from the point of view of psychology it is necessary to list them separately. The frame around a picture, if we consider this frame as a message intended to order or organize the perception of the viewer, says, ‘Attend to what is within and do not attend to what is outside.’ Figure and ground, as these terms are used by gestalt psychologists, are not symmetrically related as are the set and nonset of set theory. Perception of the ground must be positively inhibited and perception of the figure (in this case the picture) must be positively enhanced.” [Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc. 1987. Page 193.]

“Self-presentation is not a new topic for researchers. [Erving] Goffman’s remarks in the seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life remain refreshingly current and lucid. He conceptualized the presentation of self in evervday life as an ongoing process of information management and distinguished between the expressions one gives and the expressions given off, specifying that expressions given off are more theatrical and contextual, usually nonverbal, and presumably unintentional. Expressions one gives are easier to manipulate than expressions one gives off. A person stages a daily ‘information game,’ whereby the impressions formed of him/her become a result of his/her expertise in controlling the information given and given off. Goffman referred to this game as a ‘performance.’

“A Web page provides the ideal setting for this type of information game, allowing maximum control over the information disclosed. The absence of nonverbal or other social cues restricts the information exchanged to the specific facts the Weh page creator wants to communicate. Personal Web pages, lacking in media richness and social presence, restrain nonverbal communication. The expressions given off are either minimal, or carefully controlled, or both.”

[Zizi Papacharissi, “The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life: Characteristics of Personal Home Pages.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Volume 79, number 3, autumn 2002. Pages 643-660.]

“This is the ways things always were—until quite recently. For most of our history, the public domain was just over the horizon. From 1790 until 1978, the average copyright term was never more than thirty-two years, meaning that most culture just a generation and a half old was free for anyone to build upon without the permission of anyone else. Today’s equivalent would be for creative work from the 1960s and 1970s to now be free for the next Walt Disney to build upon without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for content from before the Great Depression.

“Of course, Walt Disney had no monopoly on ‘Walt Disney creativity.’ Nor does America. The norm of free culture has, until recently, and except within totalitarian nations, been broadly exploited and quite universal.”

[Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004. Pages 24-25.]

“Revisiting debates over recognition and redistribution politics, I argue that viewing homophobia as ‘merely cultural’ enables international financial institutions (IFIs) to obscure the material conditions that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-producing those conditions. Positioning themselves as external to the problem they seek to alleviate, IFIs are able to cast themselves as progressive forces in a greater moral struggle at precisely the historical moment in which austerity and capitalist crisis threaten to bring them into ever-greater disrepute. In sum, through a critical survey of recent IFI initiatives on homophobia, I attempt to delineate the emerging contours of what I call ‘global homocapitalism.’” [Rahul Rao, “Global homocapitalism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 194, November/December 2015. Pages 38-49.]

“In trying to construct a Marxist theory of art (in the methodological sense indicated previously), we might start by attending to the distinction between the category of art and what might appear to be another category with which it could be confused. This second category is indicated in saying it includes music, dancing, poetry, sculpture, painting, drama, ballet, opera, novels, architecture, and at this point it makes sense to say etc. Thus if you were asked to extend the list you would be unlikely to say ‘petrol’ or ‘shears.’ Now this category is not the category of art, though it includes it. Thus, for instance, the category includes contemporary low culture which is excluded from the catetory of art.” [Roger Taylor, “The Marxist Theory of Art.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 5, summer 1973. Pages 29-34.]

“The point of a critical approach to journalism education is to redefine the object of study, to move away from ‘journalism as it is practiced’ to the framing of journalism as an institutional practice of representation with its own historical, political, economic and cultural conditions of existence. While this reformulation of journalism school remains contentious, and the steps involved in its actualization are complex, the introduction of critical communication studies to the journalism curriculum offers students a means of bridging the practical and abstract components of course work and provides journalism as a method with a sound epistemological basis.” [David Skinner, Mike J. Gasher, and James Compton, “Putting theory to practice: A critical approach to journalism studies.” Journalism. Volume 2, number 3, 2001. Pages 341-360.]

“Although we coined the phrase “critical autism studies” as a title for our workshop, we view the contours of this field as emergent and in flux. Indeed, our goal in assembling this international, interdisciplinary group of scholars was in part to interrogate rather than define or delimit the boundaries of this emerging field of study. Of course, Worlds of Autism cannot contain the depth or diversity of current work; for example, with the exception of Francisco Ortega’s chapter, it does not engage, to any significant extent, with the work of critical neuroscientists &8230;. Despite inevitable shortcomings and omissions in our various discussions and writings since this collaborative project began, we continue to question what exactly is “critical” about critical autism studies, and attempt to keep the space open and accessible for new and emerging scholars. Our collective response to date is far from exhaustive, yet we have identified three main elements of a critical approach to the study of autism that shape the form and content of this collection:

[Michael Orsini and Joyce Davidson, “Critical Autism Studies: Notes on an Emerging Field.” Worlds of Autism: Across the Spectrum of Neurological Difference. Joyce Davidson and Michael Orsini, editors. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“This book is the first edited collection that is firmly located within the previously non-existent field of critical autism studies.…

“We see critical autism studies as a cross-disciplinary endeavour bringing together ideas from a variety of perspectives such as critical psychiatry, critical and community psychology, social sciences, disability studies, education, cultural studies, and ‘experts by experience.’ The different disciplinary locations of the authors within this book means different discourses are encountered. However, all the authors share a commitment to challenging non-critical approaches to autism that limit, and sometimes damage, people who attract and receive the label.

“The broad aim of this book is to unsettle any of the current accepted understandings that view autism as a biologically based biomedical disorder or brain difference. The authors in this text seek to examine the pseudo-scientific claims upon which autism as biological disorder and difference are premised as well as to explore how autism is produced, consumed and commodified, and for what purposes, in the twenty-first century, while being mindful of the impact of these debates in the lives of people labelled with autism. The book is radical in calling for a move away from diagnosing autism as the starting point for improving service provision for those who experience the type of difficulties that could lead to such a diagnosis.”

[Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, and Sami Timimi, “Introduction.” Re-Thinking Autism: Diagnosis, Identity and Equality. Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, and Sami Timimi, editors. London and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 2016. Kindle edition.]

“While there are, as yet, no formal ‘Deaf theories,’ Deaf peoples’ efforts to name and describe themselves and, in so doing, to end their oppression, while unique, are also akin to parallel efforts made by members of other subordinated groups. (… [There are] the relatively recent academic pursuits of ‘subordinate’ groups, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and so forth, as ‘emancipatory knowledges.’) In fact, the similarities can be striking.…

“Defining ‘Deaf theory’ holds the promise of breaking the long tradition of the Deaf/hearing dichotomous position, and, in so doing, allows the cultural signifier ‘Deaf’ to be self-defined and self-valued without relation to a ‘hearing’ one. Ultimately, in approaching ‘Deaf theory’ academic credibility and the power of social capital accrues to Deaf Studies and, by association, to Deaf scholars, and to scholarship on Deaf culture. Over time, the production of knowledge that more richly and accurately names and describes Deafhood will, we believe, improve the overall conditions of existence for Deaf people the world over. It is toward these ends that this article is dedicated.”

[Kendra L. Smith and M. J. Bienvenu, “‘Deaf theory’: what can we learn from feminist theory?” Multicultural Education. Volume 15, number 1, fall 2007. Pages 58-63.]

“To attain an understanding of the cultural specificities of journalism, and of what journalism could and ought to do in particular contexts, critical journalism studies must be empirical. It must seek to understand more fully the conditions under which journalists do their work. Empirical work tells us that journalists in Uganda and the United States share a concern over the low pay and low status of the profession …. Whether it [empirical work] is quantitative or qualitative, in the form of surveys, interviews, historical accounts, ethnographies, or focus groups, journalism studies must continue to add to our knowledge of cultural specifi city. It can be a useful corrective to the determinism of political economy and propaganda approaches, but also remind us of the very real constraints and dangers for journalists.” [Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, “Wanted: Critical journalism studies to embrace its critical potential.” Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies. Volume 25, issue 2, 2004. Pages 350-353.]

“American Empire is a tonic to read: crisp, vivid, pungent, with a dry sense of humour and sharp sense of hypocrisies. [Andrew] Bacevich is a conservative, who explains that he believed in the justice of America’s war against Communism, and continues to do so, but once it was over came to the conclusion that us expansionism both preceded and exceeded the logic of the Cold War, and needed to be understood in a longer, more continuous historical durée.…

“Bacevich … focuses … on the ideology and instruments of the new, post-Cold War imperialism.… Bacevich insists that the empire did not just grow like Topsy: it was the outcome of a particular world view and was built by a coherent strategy, which gained support from the American people.”

[Peter Gowan, “Instruments of Empire.” New Left Review. Series II, number 21, May–June 2003. Pages 147-153.]

“… as a result of the [Bill] Clinton administration’s penchant for relying on missiles to spank and to scold, Americans became inured to the use of air power as an instrument of so-called coercive diplomacy. As bombing became routine, it also became noncontroversial. With the United States conferring upon itself wide latitude to wield its preferred military instrument, the American people and even American elites gave their tacit assent to a new Clinton doctrine governing the use of force. By the end of the decade the air weapon, as one senior military officer proclaimed, had ‘become the instrument of choice in America’s foreign policy.’ None questioned the truth of that assertion.” [Andrew Bacevich. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2002. Page 203.]

“[Karl] Marx sought to tear away the veil that covers social reality and to show under what conditions and by what mechanisms the laws of economy impose themselves as though they were like the laws of nature, that is to say like forces external to society, even though these economic laws are nothing but the expression of forces internal to it. The project of Marx remains totally incomprehensible to all those—and they are legion—who do not see that in this project the theory of value fulfills a central function (whose import they ignore) in assimilating an empirical reality of the highest degree, of phenomenal status. The concept of alienation is therefore at the center of the question here, and defines exactly the specific object domain of the study, social reality, different from and not analogous to that which is the object of the sciences of nature. I shall therefore … center my reflections on this concept of alienation, which alone permits us to define the object of the project of historical materialism, its specificity, its frontiers. In doing so I shall articulate the question of ethical values in the analysis of the functioning of society and by that discover the laws that regulate it.” [Samir Amin, “Historical and ethical materialism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 45, issue 2, June 1993. Pages 44-56.]

“Capitalism, and the ruthlessness of its quantitative reduction of nature, depends on the domination of labor, and so does the imperative of self-expansion which makes it necessary and possible for capitalism to drive out all other social forms. If capital is to be overcome, therefore, the domination of labor must be overcome. This tells us that the search for an ecologically sustainable society and the search for a just society are fundamentally the same. Both point toward a socialism predicated on the overcoming of capital and its domination of labor—a socialism which it is our obligation to create.” [Joel Kovel, “The enemy of nature.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 49, issue 6, November 1997. Pages 6-14.]

“If concern for the social conditions of workers were driving goverment policies, we would be seeing something very different from the subsidies that favor capital, tax write-offs for machinery, and favorable tax treatment for industry when plants are closed (but nothing for the stranded workers), and the reduction of already inadequate spending on job creation, health and education for working-class families. A socially conscious government would focus on the taxation and regulation of capital, not immigration and allegedly unfair labor advantages of other countries.

“These remarks are not made to suggest that the struggle for labor standards cannot be an important way to place some limits on capital in industrializing countries, and to raise consciousness concerning the extent of exploitation and oppression, but to underline that the struggle must be for working-class power. This requires workers’ rights achieved in struggle by workers themselves, with as much support as possible from other progressive movements, and not simply the adoption of standards rendered ineffectual by the absence of enforcement mechanisms.”

[William K. Tabb, “Progressive Globalism: Challenging the Audacity of Capital.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 50, issue 9, February 1999. Pages 1-10.]

“I argue in this article that the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and progressives who might be persuaded by the ACLU’s logic are making a terrible mistake, and one that cannot be justified if one maintains a commitment to political democracy. This error is part and parcel of a broader process whereby the First Amendment has become more a mechanism for protecting class privilege than for protecting and promoting freedom and democracy. In my view, progressives need to stake out a democratic interpretation of the First Amendment and do direct battle with the Orwellian implications of the ACLU’s commercialized First Amendment. And, as should be clear, this is far more than an academic battle: the manner in which the First Amendment is interpreted has a direct beating on our politics, media, and culture. That is why the political right and business community have devoted so much attention to converting it into their own possession.” [Robert W. McChesney, “The new theology of the First Amendment: Class privilege over democracy.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 49, issue 10, March 1998. Pages 17-35.]

“… the question of human rights was abused by the United States and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] as a tool aimed at the destruction of what had been achieved in the socialist countries, is still abused as a vehicle for the assertion of hegemonic interests against the independence of states of the third world, and is ever more frequently accompanied by the use of military power. This is a dangerous development which can properly be designated human rights imperialism.” [Uwe-Jens Heuer and Gregor Schirmer, “Human rights imperialism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 49, issue 10, March 1998. Pages 5-16.]

“This article is concerned with the similarities and differences between two critical discourses: the environmental/ecological and human security literature, and the critical globalization literature. These approaches have differing concepts of nature-society relations and different understandings of nature. Especially in the field of development, the interplay of nature and society is crucially important. These two bodies of literature do not ‘speak’ to each other and are rarely cross-referenced in the literature. Nevertheless, they make substantively similar arguments and draw similar conclusions as to the structural origins and effects of poverty and environmental degradation.” [Gabriela Kutting, “Environment, Development, and the Global Perspective: From Critical Security to Critical Globalization.” Nature and Culture. Volume 2, number 1, spring 2007. Pages 49-66.]

“A central paradox of contemporary capitalism is the fact that while the production of commodities has been globalized at a staggering pace, our knowledge about the production of those same commodities has shrunk. Consumers are usually only able to see commodities in the here and now of time and space, and rarely have any opportunities to gaze backwards through the chains of production in order to gain knowledge about the sites of production, transformation, and distribution.” [Mark Graham, “Web 2.0 and Critical Globalization Studies.” The Radical Teacher. Number 87, spring 2010. Pages 70-71.]

“While we recognize a role for policy and professional approaches to globalization research (e.g., demographic analysis, statistical accounts of global financial flows), our focus here is publicly engaged, critical globalization scholarship—an academic enterprise that takes on issues of public relevance to communities in the Global South, and adopts a critical perspective challenging the defeatist tone of neo-liberal orthodoxy (known in activist circles as the ideology of TINA: there is no alternative).

“This begs the question of what values could, or should guide critical globalization scholarship. We argue that a key source of intellectual inspiration can be found in thewritings of Paulo Freire (1921–1997), a Brazilian thinker famous for his theories of popular education, and often described as one of the most influential educational theorists of the twenty-first century”

[Josée Johnston and James Goodman, “Hope and Activism in the Ivory Tower: Freirean Lessons for Critical Globalization Research.” Globalizations. Volume 3, number 1, March 2006. Pages 9-30.]

“As an emergent field which announced itself as a ‘new’ approach to studying race and racialization in the early 1990s, Whiteness Studies has been tracking its own development in the last two decades with some interest. The earliest debates centered on what it was that the emergent field in fact studied – trying to get to grips with what this ‘whiteness’ being invoked actually was – an identity? an ideology? a social positioning? – and articulating how this conceptual site was related to actual racialized white bodies, and to the mainstream traditions of studying racism, anti-racism and race relations ….” [Melissa Steyn and Daniel Conway, “Introduction: Intersecting whiteness, interdisciplinary debates.” Ethnicities. Volume 10, number 3, 2010. Pages 283-291.]

“This essay … attempts to situate the 1990s origins of a new, distinctly history-based body of critical studies of US whiteness among a circle of writers with common and disparate left experiences and Marxist ideas, dating back at least to the 1960s and in some cases to the 1930s. The authors of these studies often shared mentors, inspirations, and publishing venues. We knew each other by the twos, threes, and fours, although we never functioned as a group and in fact would have bridled at the idea that a field of ‘whiteness studies’ should exist outside of radical history and ethnic studies. The chapter attempts, then, to describe a milieu, and to recall some of its formation, suggesting the key role of a Marxism grounded in labor activism and in the ideas of C.L.R. James, [James] Baldwin, George Rawick, and above all [W. E. B.] Du Bois. Even the embrace by some of us of psychoanalysis as a way to shape inquiries emerged from within the left. The achievement of Marxists in recasting study of race through critical histories of whiteness deserves emphasis because the successes of historical materialism in the US have been rare enough over the last two decades. The field’s emergence as an historical materialist project, and partly in the specific context of the Black freedom movement, also warrants elaboration because there is some tendency among academic critics to imagine that the critical study of whiteness issues from postmodernism, Freud, and identity politics, even in opposition to Marxism. At its most sloppy, or desirous of scoring supposed points for one kind of Marxism over another, such criticism descended to branding critical whiteness studies as a ‘critique of historical materialism’ or as an expression of ‘the anti-materialism so fashionable at present’ or even (in a critique of [Theodore] Allen of all writers) as ‘extreme philosophical idealism.’ Such critiques have typically credited [Eric] Arnesen’s frankly empiricist and non-Marxist stance early in a review essay and then have later pronounced on which books under consideration are sufficiently materialist and which are not. (It might be said, in mitigation, that Arensen in the space of a few lines was capable of criticizing whiteness scholars for not making a ‘cleaner’ break from Marxism, and then to brand them as ‘pseudo-Marxists,’ implying perhaps that he held some unstated commitment to a fully unspecified ‘real’ Marxism. He likewise could deride psychoanalysis and simultaneously claim a perch from which to judge others as practicing ‘pseudopsychoanalysis.’ There was ample room for confusion.) In some cases, there crops up among scholars who have scarcely acknowledged the existence of Marxism in their long careers a sudden interest in defending Marxism against ‘whiteness studies,’ one which comes to be directed against those who have long written as Marxists.” [David Roediger. Class, Race and Marxism. London and Brooklyn, New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2017. Page 52-53.]

“… far from laying the foundations of a second American Century, the occupation of Iraq has jeopardized the credibility of us military might, further undermined the centrality of the us and its currency within the global political economy, and strengthened the tendency towards the emergence of China as an alternative to us leadership in East Asia and beyond. It would have been hard to imagine a more rapid and complete failure of the neo-conservative imperial project. But if the current [George W. Bush] Administration’s bid for global supremacy is most likely to go down in history as one of the several ‘bubbles’ to have punctuated the terminal crisis of us hegemony, its bursting does not mean that the world-historical circumstances that generated the Project for a New American Century will evaporate—or that Washington will not remain a dominant player in world affairs.” [Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unravelling—1.” New Left Review. Series II, number 32, March–April 2005. Pages 23-80.]

“The neo-conservatives in the Bush administration … did not initiate the transformation of the us from legitimate protector into racketeer. When they came to power it was already at an advanced stage. But by pushing it too far, they unwittingly ended up exposing its limits, both military and economic. As we saw in the first part of this essay, their attempt to demonstrate that American military might could effectively police the world and at the same time ensure the continuing centrality of the United States in the global political economy failed in both respects.” [Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unravelling—2.” New Left Review. Series II, number 33, May–June 2005. Pages 83-116.]

“Commodities produced using the means of production in which capital has been invested are thus always in danger of remaining unsold because of the restricted base of consumption under capitalism. From this spring what are called realization crises. The surplus-value which labour produces and incorporates in commodities is not realized—in other words, it does not form profit—because part of the commodities in question either remain unsold or can only be sold at such low prices that potential profit is reduced or nullified. In this case, the crisis occurs because the rate of exploitation (the relation between the portion of social product which is appropriated by capital and the portion retained by the workers) is ‘too high’ to allow the realization of surplus-value.” [Giovanni Arrighi, “Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis.” New Left Review. Series I, number 111, September–October 1978. Pages 3-24.]

“By drawing upon Muslim voices condemning terrorists as non-Muslim, the U.S. state is able to legitimize their killing in both religious and political terms. This liberal takfīr has been subverted and used widely to justify the power of the secular sovereign state. And it is notable that the United States is so concerned with religious identity. The United States’ consistent appellation of terrorist to certain types of self-proclaimed Muslims functions only alongside the rejection of their Muslimness. Without takfīr, the United States would be undermining its stated secular-pluralist commitment to protecting religious freedom. This has placed the U.S. government as a strange authority on ‘true’ Islam, but through the conscription of Muslim voices also decrying groups like al-Qāʻida [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, القَاعِدَة, ʾal-Qāʿidaẗ, ‘the base’] and ISIS [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, دإِعِش, DꞌIʿIŠ] through liberal takfīr, the state is able to maintain its position as arbiter of Islam (and proper religiosity more generally).” [Caleb D. McCarthy, “‘The Islamic State is not Islamic:’ Terrorism, Sovereignty and Declarations of Unbelief.” Critical Research on Religion. Volume 4, number 2, 2016. Pages 156-170.]

“It is probably fair to say of labels such as ‘fundamentalist,’ ‘secularist,’ which are in common use today in writing about modern we cannot live very easily with them, but that we certainly them.

“On one hand, such labels have undoubtedly often functioned understanding the actual people and tendencies involved, are frequently used without explicit definition, in part because lump together widely differing phenomena, and in part convey an implicit bias or value judgment. In my view, this is the label ‘fundamentalist.’ On the other hand, we cannot to talk about things, and we certainly cannot begin to make vast and complex as the modern Muslim world unless manifold phenomena into a manageable number of categories designations. It is not a question of whether we use labels, but One purpose of this article is to contribute to the quest for suitable area. Another, and of course more important one, is to contribute standing of those so labeled. I shall attempt to do this discussing a typology of ‘ideological orientations.’ The main ‘secularism,’ ‘Islamic modernism,’ ‘radical Islamism,’ ‘traditionalism,’ ‘neo-traditionalism,’ with subtypes discerned in several cases.”

[William E. Shepard, “Islam and Ideology: Towards a Typology.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. Volume 19, number 3, Auguse 1987. Pages 307-335.]

“… while social movements in earlier periods have depended on media such as the printing press, the telegraph, the radio, and even the television, the Internet has certain emergent qualities. Information can now flow across communication networks to allow broad exchanges between large numbers of actors, creating rich possibilities for democratic interaction …. The various alternative globalization/global justice movements (AGM/AJMs) are Internetworked Social Movements (ISMs) that owe their very existence to the Internet. Information technology thus enables new forms of online social movement actions, cyberactivism, and cyberpolitics ….

“… NSM [new social movement] theory speaks to the cultural critique of the Frankfurt School.”

[Lauren Langman, “From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements.” Sociological Theory. Volume 23, number 1, March 2005. Pages 42-74.]

“The New Sociology of Education is … part of the wider movement in social theory which rejects the pursuit of value-free explanations of social structure, demanding instead a new focus for theory which relates understanding to action.…

“In essence, the new sociology reintroduced an ethical dimension to social theory which had been largely exclued by positivistic social science. To this end the New Sociology of Education in particuiar, the development of an epistemology that takes account of, focusses on: the development of an epistemology that takes account of the social bases of understanding; a systematic analysis of relationships between social, cultural, epistemological and educational domination; the ways in which such structures of domination control the practices of teachers; and the improvement of practice through processes of critical refIection on the relation between practice and the potential for human emancipation.”

[Richard A. Bates, “Towards a Critical Practice of Educational Administration.” Presented at Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Associate. New York, New York. March, 1982. Pages 1-27. Retrieved on August 31st, 2016.]

“As refugees from civil war enter the EU [European Union] on an unprecedented scale, … personifications of ‘Christian Europe,’ of a splendidly isolated Albion or a purely German Germany return to the surface.…

“At present, the Christian Right asserts the personhood of fetuses while the animal rights movement attempts to claim personhood for primates, or for animals in general. A court case about the personal rights of two lab chimpanzees at Stony Brook University has been widely reported on.…

“… the ‘nonhuman rights’ movement can reach a tipping point where personhood is clearly redefined beyond and against the prevailing paradigm.”

[Sven Lütticken, “Personification: Performing the Persona in Art and Activism.” New Left Review. Series II, number 96, November–December 2015.]

“In various texts and interviews, published over the course of several decades, Alfred Hitchcock developed what might be called a poetics of suspense and surprise. In his conversations with François Truffaut, Hitchcock illustrated this opposition in graphic terms:

“We are having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has to be an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there.

“Hitchcock always insisted that the latter situation was preferable. ‘In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have given them fifteen minutes of suspense.’ Suspense, then, is more value for money, more time for money: it stretches time. Contrary to many suspense situations that involve real danger, the suspense experienced in the context of a film is usually a pleasurable one, the time-stretching desirable.”

[Sven Lütticken, “Suspense and … Surprise.” New Left Review. Series II, number 40, July–August 2006. Pages 95-109.]

“For school people, … participation in this process [self-reflection and critical inquiry] would mean the involvement of the school staff in communication characterized by free exploration, honest exchange, and non-manipulative discussion of exisiing and deliberately generated knowledge in light of these critical issues: What goes on in this school? Who benefits from the way things are? How might educational practice work toward liberation from exploitive relationships and the domination of social, political, and economic interests? How can schools help develop the capacity to make free and responsible choices about the direction of individual lives and the evolution of society? The potential contribution of this third phase of inquiry to significant educational change is promising,for the kind of emancipatory understanding that can come from critical reflection about the school within its society seems necessary to build a responsive, renewing climate in schools.” [Jeannie Oakes and Kenneth A. Sirotnik, “An Immodest Proposal: From Critical Theory to Critical Practice for School Renewal.” Los Angeles, California: Center for the Study of Evaluation. 1983. Pages 1-50.]

“The account of alienation in Marx thus directs us to the realm of ‘produced objects.’ By making labor into the central category of both his epistemology and his social theory, Marx draws our at tention to the fact that most of what we call the ‘objective world,’ the world of objects, is in fact a world of human objects, objects produced by humans through labor. We are alienated from this world when we fail to recognize its humanity, when we are unable to see it as our world, our product, and when it accordingly begins to appear as an alien power over and against us.” [Steven Vogel, “Marx and Alienation From Nature.” Social Theory and Practice. Volume 14, number 3, fall 1988. Pages 367-387.]

“Moral atrophy constitutes a specific form of alienation because it fits within the general approach of alienation as a removal of one’s authentic self from its relations and the broader world of which it is a part. The theorists of alienation who saw it as a historical phenomenon did so because they saw its roots in modern forms of industrialized, rationalized forms of production that removed the artisanal modes of production as well as the Gemeinschaftlich [communal or collective] forms of social relations that were predominant before the modern period. However, this phase of alienation can be seen to be supplanted or at least augmented by the pathology of moral atrophy. On this view, alienation becomes the elimination of the faculty of independent moral judgment to such an extent that it becomes difficult to reconstruct (i) that specific moral-cognitive style of thinking and (ii) to confront the anxiety experienced by alienated subjects when challenging the value systems that constitute their lives.” [Michael J. Thompson, “Alienation as Atrophied Moral Cognition and Its Implications for Political Behavior.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 43, issue 3, Septembe 2013. Pages 301-321.]

“The personal troubles that patients bring to doctors often have roots in social issues beyond medicine. While medical encounters involve ‘micro-level’ interactions between individuals, these interpersonal processes occur in a social context shaped by ‘macro-level’ structures in society. Examining prior theories pertinent to medical discourse leads to the propositions: (a) that medical encounters tend to convey ideologic messages supportive of the current social order; (b) that these encounters have repercussions for social control; and (c) that medical language generally excludes a critical appraisal of the social context. The technical structure of the medical encounter, as traditionally seen by health professionals, masks a deeper structure that may have little to do with the conscious thoughts of professionals about what they are saying and doing. Similar patterns may appear in encounters between clients and members of other ‘helping’ professions. Expressed marginally or conveyed by absence of criticism about contextual issues, ideology and social cantrol in medical discourse remain largely unintentional mechanisms for achieving consent.” [Howard Waitzkin, “A Critical Theory of Medical Discourse: Ideology, Social Control, and the Processing of Social Context in Medical Encounters.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Volume 30, June 1989. Pages 220-239.]

“We focus on ontologies of number as a means of interrogating the kinds of computational practices that saturate everyday life.… Many of these projects inherit insights from philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who shows up in most if not all of these articles, tapping his counter-history of mathematics and his philosophy of immanence.…

“Although the deconstructive workings of the discursive turn in the social sciences put into question the epistemological foundations of number, there was little to no interrogation of the ontology of number beyond its refusal.…

“… Whereas the discursive turn emphasized how sociocultural and historical conditions shape and form our embodied experiences, the computational turn better attends to the agencies and materialities of algorithmic acts and software practices that are operating within digital architectures.”

[Elizabeth de Freitas, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, and Patti Lather, “Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 16, number 5, October 2016. Pages 431-434.]

“A good deal of the recent discussion of identity politics takes the form of arguments about whether to be for it, or against it. The dispute is in one sense pointless. Identity politics is almost surely inevitable, because it is a way of thinking that reflects something very elemental about human experience. Identity politics seems to be rooted quite simply in attachments to the group, attachments that are common to humankind, and that probably reflect primordial needs that are satisfied by the group, for material survival in a predatory world, as well as for recognition, community, security, and perhaps also a yearning for immortality. Hence people construct the ‘collective identities’ which define the common traits and common interests of the group, and inherit and invent shared traditions and rituals which bind them together. The mirror image of this collective identity is the invention of the Other, whoever that may be, and however many they may be. And as is often pointed out, it is partly through the construction of the Other, the naming of its traits, the demarcation of its locality, and the construction of a myth-like history of struggle between the group and the Other, that the group recognizes itself. All of this seems natural enough.” [Frances Fox Piven, “Globalizing Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics.” Socialist Register. Volume 31, 1995. Pages 102-116.]

“Rather than relying upon the Kuhnian paradigmatic orientation …, we have developed the more encompassing critical framework of Jürgen Habermas by bridging the gap between contemporary Marxist theory, the internal colonial model, and the Chicano world view. The study of Chicanos can be undertaken within the prevailing critical theory framework because it provides a means of incorporating the emancipatory theme proposed by the Chicano culture within the Chicano experience.” [Richard F. Lowry and David V. Baker, “Transcendence, Critical Theory and Emancipation: Reconceptualizing the Framework for Chicano Studies.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies. Volume 15, number 4, winter 1988. Pages 57-68.]

“Ultimately, the ideals of CMS [critical management studies] are human emancipation and enlightenment ….” [Max Visser, “Critical management studies and ‘mainstream’ organization science: A proposal for a rapprochement.” International Journal of Organizational Analysis. Volume 18, number 4. Pages 466-478. Retrieved on August 25th, 2015.]

“Critical management studies (CMS) offers a range of alternatives to mainstream management theory with a view to radically transforming management practice. The common core is deep skepticism regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of the prevailing forms of management and organization.” [Paul S. Adler, Linda C. Forbes, and Hugh Willmott, Critical Management Studies. Retrieved on August 25th, 2015.]

“How does something such as dirt move from the banal to the exceptional, and back again? This question can be addressed empirically by investigating the securitization of dirt in border zones. Dirt is an evocative descriptor for border politics, partaking of the classical image of the border as the so-called ‘line in the sand.’ But it is also something quite literal: omnipresent, it covers the boots and clothing of unauthorized migrants and the border patrol alike. In comparison to the vast literature on the movement of people across borders, there is relatively little analysis of the movement of the physical terrain – acts of moving dirt – in border crossings. If objects can have a force or direction that is not always controlled, directed or predictable by human beings, can dirt have a force or direction of its own?” [Peter Nyers, “Moving borders: The politics of dirt.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 174, July/August 2012. Pages 2-6.]

“Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain to the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.…

“Art is not science. The aesthetic effect is not an effect of knowledge. However, as differentiating realization and denunciation of ideology, art is closer to science than to ideology. It produces the imaginary reality of that which science appropriates in its real reality.

“In the Marxist tradition, art is classified among the ‘ideological forms.’ And yet, in the same tradition, the evaluation of certain artworks involves criteria derived from the concept of truth (the work is a ‘real reflection of life’), the use of which implicitly assimilates certain levels of the work to the functioning of a theoretical knowledge.”

[Alain Badiou, “The autonomy of the aesthetic process (1965).” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 178, March/April 2013. Pages 32-39.]

“All great philosophers in the Western tradition have recognized that an epistemology, or a theory of knowledge, is of crucial importance for the elaboration of coherent world views, and for intelligent and reflective action in the world…. This book is a contribution to philosophy of education; its epistemology is in the Marxist tradition; it will underpin the analyses and proposals of the now mushrooming radical sociological and historical studies of schooling.” [Michael R. Matthews. The Marxist Theory of Schooling: A Study of Epistemology and Education. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc. 1980. Page 1.]

“Education is an important arena for people concerned with establishing a socialist society. Socialism is not achieved by simply changing economic relations; it requires the changing of hearts and minds, the development of an informed and critical consciousness among people…. The epistemology and theory of ideology advanced in this book is meant as a contribution to the task of a socialist pedagogy. A central element of this task is class theory, and the identification of the inroads of class interest into the corpus of knowledge, culture and ideology in which we move and have our being.” [Michael R. Matthews. The Marxist Theory of Schooling: A Study of Epistemology and Education. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc. 1980. Page 199.]

“… [There needs to be a] reaffirmation of the objective, ontic (or, as [Georg] Klaus says, ‘ontological’) application of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction …

“… there was a problem of great urgency and of vital importance at stake— in other words, the relationship between Marxism and science. In this connection the restoration of the principle of non-contradiction was the vital step.…

“The fundamental principle of materialism and of science, as we have seen, is the principle of non-contradiction. Reality cannot contain dialectical contradictions but only real oppositions, conflicts between forces, relations of contrariety.…

“… For Marx, capitalism is contradictory not because it is a reality and all realities are contradictory, but because it is an upside-down, inverted reality (alienation, fetishism).”

[Lucio Colletti, “Marxism and the Dialectic.” New Left Review. Series I, number 93, September–October 1975. Pages 3-29.]

“My aim in the present book is to present a systematic exposition of an historical-materialist aesthetic, and by extension, an orderly sociological reading of poetry and art in general. This entails in the first place a radical critique of established aesthetic conceptions, principally if not exclusively those of romanticism and idealism….

“This book must thus be seen as an attempt at a rationalist and materialist emendatio [Latin, ēmendātiō, emendation, correction, or improvement] of traditional (bourgeois) taste.”

[Galvano Della Volpe. Critique of Taste. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1991. Pages 11-12.]

“… we can … conclude:

[Galvano Della Volpe, “The Marxist Critique of Rousseau.” New Left Review. Series I, number 59, January–February 1970. Pages 101-109.]

“My main argument in this book is that the postmodern sign, whether financial or linguistic, is epistemologically false and ethically degenerate. Postmodernism is thus the veritable apotheosis of ideology. I ended the Introduction to Ideology’s first edition with the contention that ‘postmodernism is nothing more than the ideology of consumer capitalism.’ Many postmodernists consider themselves to be political radicals, and my statement provoked howls of protest. Today, however, a burgeoning awareness of the repressive political power of financial representation, and of its kinship with the modes of autonomous linguistic and semiotic representation that postmodernism promotes, has provoked many investigations of the complicity between global capitalism and postmodernist philosophy.” [David Hawkes. Ideology. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 10.]

“Cognitive theories of religion are motiveless. They cannot, in principle, distinguish Mickey Mouse and the Magic Mountain from Jesus and the burning bush, fantasy from religious belief. They cannot explain why people are able to willingly sacrifice even their lives to uphold religious belief, or how thoughts about death and anxiety affect feelings of religiosity. If religious belief and fantasy are pretty much the same, then why, for example, do individuals who are placed inside a sensory deprivation tank have an easier time evoking religious images than cartoon images, but not when those individuals are outside the tank …? Why do people in all societies spontaneously chant and dance or pray and sway to religious representations, but do not rythmically follow other factual or fictive representations so routinely?” [Scott Atran. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Page 12.]

“The criterion of costly commitment rules out cognitive theories of religion as inadequate, however insightful they may be. Cognitive theories attempt to explain religious belief and practice as cultural manipulations of ordinary psychological processes of categorization, reasoning, and remembering …. They do not account for the emotional involvement that leads people to sacrifice to others what is dear to themselves, including labor, limb, and life. Such theories are often short on motive and are unable to distinguish Mickey Mouse from Moses, cartoon fantasy from religious belief …. They fail to tell us why, in general, the greater the sacrifice – as in Abraham offering up his beloved son – the more others trust in one’s religious commitment ….” [Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan, “Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Volume 27, 2004. Pages 713-730.]

“In summary, the more frequently participants took part in religious rituals, the more they considered their preferences to be sacred values. This was true for preferences pertaining to religious topics as well as for those that did not have any religious content. In contrast, disgust sensitivity and—more surprisingly—cognitive need for closure were not related to our sacred values measure. These null results suggest that we should cast a more critical eye on these motivational accounts for sacred values. However, because of the theoretical strength of these accounts, we believe that further research is necessary before they should be discounted.” [Hammad Sheikh, Jeremy Ginges, Alin Coman, and Scott Atran, “Religion, group threat and sacred values.” Judgment and Decision Making. Volume 7, number 2, March 2012. Pages 110-118.]

“An alternative view is that religion (unlike, say, language) involves no particular biological adaptation with clear units of selection. Religion is a fuzzy category with no transparent distinction between beliefs or actions as religious or not. Nevertheless, readily identifiable clusters of empirically and logically inscrutable beliefs reoccur cross-culturally as a by-product of nonreligious cognitive functions evolved for mundane purposes. For example, notions of invisible supernaturals may be the byproduct of a biologically specialized ‘mental module’ that underlies universal folk psychology, and which is hair-triggered to detect intentional agents as friend or foe under uncertain conditions: People easily imagine voices in the wind or faces in shadows because, from an evolutionary vantage, ‘better safe than sorry.’” [Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges, “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict.” Science. Volume 336, issue 6083, May 2012. Pages 855-857.]

“Sacred values differ from material or instrumental values in that they incorporate moral beliefs that drive action in ways that seem dissociated from prospects for success. Across the world, people believe that devotion to essential or core values — such as the welfare of their family and country, or their commitment to religion, honor, and justice — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Such deeper ‘cultural’ values that are bound up with people’s identities often trump tradeoffs with other values, particularly economic ones ….” [Scott Atran and Robert Axelrod, “In Theory: Reframing Sacred Values.” Negotiation Journal. Volume 24, number 3, July 2008. Pages 221-246.]

“In Gods We Trust joins a rapidly growing list of books and articles in an interdisciplinary project that has become known as the cognitive science of religion. This project, more than a decade in the making, involves international scholarly conversation and cooperation among cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary psychologists, cognitive anthropologists, cognitive neuroscientists, historians of religion, and philosophers, all of whom are convinced that the time is ripe and that the theoretical tools are in place for explaining religious thought and behavior in new and interesting ways.” [E. Thomas Lawson, “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.” Review article. The Journal of Religion. Volume 84, number 2, April 2004. Pages 310-311.]

“In [Scott] Atran’s formulation, religion is not in itself an evolutionary adaptation – indeed religion is hardly a single phenomenon at all. Rather, it involves ‘a variety of cognitive and affective systems, some with separate evolutionary histories, and some with no evolutionary history to speak of. Of those with an evolutionary history, some parts plausibly have an adaptive story, while others are more likely by-products. Both adaptations and by-products, in turn, have been culturally co-opted or “exapted,” in religion, to new functions absent from ances- tral environments, and which may have little if any systematic relationship to genetic fitness, such as spiritual fulfilment, artistic creation, mass scarification, and human sacrifice.’ …. Unlike language, ‘for religion there is no integrated set of cognitive principles that could represent a task-specific evolution.’” [David Lehmann, “The cognitive approach to understanding religion.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions. Volume 50, number 131/132, July–December 2005. Pages 199-213.]

“Scott Atran’s explanation of the cognitive and evolutionary basis of religion rests on a three-part definition. Religion is ‘(1) a community’s hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception’ …. In Atran’s view, religion is not itself an adaptation. However, it can manipulate evolved mental modules by means of supercharged releasing mechanisms, such as masks, rhythms, symbols, and so on. This enables self-seeking individuals to form long-lasting cooperative social bonds. Trust is engendered through the performance of genuinely costly sacrifices: cutting off a finger, subincising oneself, burning one’s possessions, and so on. We are vulnerable to such manipulation because of the ‘tragedy of cognition’; thanks to our ability to produce ‘metarepresentations,’ we can anticipate the death of ourselves and our loved ones, the self-interested lies of our fellows, as well as other potential calamities against which there is no real protection.” [Robert A. Paul, “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.” Review article. American Anthropologist. Volume 107, number 1, March 2005. Page 141.]

“The ‘most stable and recurrent cultural patterns,’ writes [Scott] Atran in this readable and provocative book, ‘are generated by specialized core adaptations of the human mind/brain’ …. Within evolutionary psychology, this is scarcely controversial – ‘stone age minds in a space age world’ is the fundamental idea. Where Atran differs from his colleagues is in attempting to glue this model to a very different one, in which social strategies, commitments, and institutions loom large. To explain religion, in Atran’s view, cognitive approaches will not suffice. Religion for Atran is more than a mass of internal representations flitting between brain and brain. Instead, he defines it as ‘costly communal commitments to hard-to-fake beliefs in the supernatural’ ….” [Chris Knight, “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.” Review article. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Volume 10, number 1, March 2004. Pages 199-200.]

“… an argument is made for re-emphasising the historical materialist conceptualisations of emancipation. Historical materialism sees emancipation as being contingent on the capacity of specific agents, located socially and historically, to identify practices that might bring about change, structures that might be transformed, and appropriate agents that are in the best position to facilitate such change. In other words it involves collective social action. This, the article argues, can involve the effective deployment of human rights. Therefore, [Karl] Marx’s claims that human rights should be eschewed were mistaken, since they fail to acknowledge the emancipatory potential of human rights, particularly the opportunities they provide for collective social action. The article then shows how such collective social action might look in practice with reference to efforts to challenge the US-led, global system of rendition and secret detention in the ‘War on Terror.’ Challenges have been articulated in human rights terms, and have led to efforts to ensure that human rights are upheld through the national and international legal architecture. Indeed, through their efforts human rights advocates have had some important successes in halting some human rights violations.” [Ruth Blakeley, “Human rights, state wrongs, and social change: the theory and practice of emancipation.” Review of International Studies. Volume 39, number 3, July 2013. Pages 599-619.]

“Contingency designates the possibility whereby something can either persist or perish, without either option contravening the invariants that govern the world. Thus, contingency is an instance of knowledge; the knowledge I have of the actual perishability of a determinate thing. I know for example that this book could be destroyed, even if I do not know when or where this destruction will occur – whether it will soon be torn up by my little girl, or rotted away decades from now by mould. But this is to know something positive about this book, viz., its actual fragility, the possibility of its not-being. However, facticity can no more be identified with contingency than with necessity, since it designates our essential ignorance about either the contingency or the necessity of our world and its invariants. By turning facticity into a property of things themselves – a property which I am alleged to know – I turn facticity from something that applies only to what is in the world into a form of contingency capable of being applied to the invariants that govern the world (i.e. its physical and logical laws).” [Quentin Meillassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Ray Brassier, translator. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2008. Pages 53-54.]

“It is within this brief theoretical and policy review that the empirical discussion of participatory planning processes associated with the preparation of the Northern Ireland RSF [Regional Strategic Framework] can be located. In this society, which is emerging out of conditions associated with a long-standing democratic de. cit and bureaucratic hegemony, the challenges facing public policy formation include shifting political debate more fully towards environmental, social and economic priorities, capturing the involvement of an active citizenry, and harnessing the collaborative energy of multiple interests in setting down an agreed vision of the future. The narrative below provides a timely examination of process innovation designed to meet these challenges within the sphere of regional land use planning over the period since 1997.” [Michael Murray and John Greer, “Participatory Planning as Dialogue: The Northern Ireland Regional Strategic Framework and its Public Examination Process.” Policy Studies. Volume 23, number 3/4, 2002. Pages 191-209.]

“The central thesis of this article is that deeper participatory planning procedures, as defined below, should be included in state redevelopment laws in recognition that the planning process serves a number of important functions. These functions include: 1) legitimizing economic redevelopment decisions in the eyes of the public and the judiciary; 2) providing important procedural legal protections for residents who live in distressed communities; and 3) providing an opportunity for low-income residents to share in the benefits of redevelopment. Although the legal literature often describes public participation in economic development planning as exemplary of purely direct democracy and empowerment principles, this article is animated by the belief that a rhetorical shift to emphasize how participatory planning adds value to the decisions ultimately made by elected legislative bodies, and provides a more legally coherent rhetorical and theoretical framework to justify such participation.” [Damon Y. Smith, “Participatory Planning and Procedural Protections: The Case for Deeper Public Participation in Urban Redevelopment.” Saint Louis University Public Law Review. Volume XXIX, number 243, June 2009. Pages 243-272.]

“… I incorporate Neil Smelser’s … value-added model into an approach based on cautious naturalism.…

“For sociologists to ignore the effects of social structure is to deny their birthright. An approach, grounded in a cautious naturalism, that incorporates both structure and interpretation permits obdurate reality to be recognized as being as real as the constructions that social actors make of it. If Hollywood is tinsel and illusion, it is, for its audiences and workers, not only tinsel and illusion.”

[Gary Alan Fine, “Scandal, Social Conditions, and the Creation of Public Attention: Fatty Arbuckle and the ‘Problem of Hollywood.’” Social Problems. Volume 44, number 3, August 1997. Pages 297-323.]

“In place of the billiard-ball causality of behaviorism, [George Herbert] Mead offers what, today, we might call a ‘fuzzy’ determinism …. From his standpoint, the past confronts the present with an array of facts, but the effects of these facts are mediated by attention and interpretation, which render their actual impact uncertain. Therefore, ‘rigorous thinking does not necessarily imply that conditioning of the present by the past carries with it the complete determinism of the present by the past’ …. This recognition of the interpretation and construction of an obdurate reality of facts has been labeled ‘cautious naturalism’ …. Mead’s fuzzy determinism makes room for the improvisational character of social interaction – a quintessential attribute, but one that is neglected or denied by other students of human nature.” [Gary Alan Fine, “Present, Past, and Future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead’s perspective on time.” Time & Society. Volume 2, number 2/3, 2001. Pages 147-161.]

“In light of the distinction that John Van Maanen … proposed in his influential Tales of the Field between realist, confessional, and impressionist ‘tales’ or representations, I was operating generally within the context of realist ethnography (or … ‘naturalism’).… These accounts assume the experiential authority of the author, a documentary text, asserting transparency, claims about the ‘native’s point of view,’ and the validity of the author’s interpretations.” [Gary Alan Fine, “Towards a peopled ethnography: Developing theory from group life.” Ethnography. Volume 4, number 1, March 2003. Pages 41-60.]

“Realist ethnography has been placed on the defensive, charged withbeingnaive, old-fashioned, and quaint.…

“The ethnographical work that I call for in the twenty-first century is linked to are invigoration of the justifications of realist (or naturalist) ethnography …. Despite the claims that have been made suggesting that realist accounts are not possible, it is important to recognize that in a particular sense, all accounts are realist. In practice, all empirical work is grounded in the assertion that readers canrely on the claims of the writer. Accounts represent truth claims, after all. Whether the claims are about the transparency of the social world or about the transparency of the author’s view of the world, the argumentis functionally identical.”

[Gary Alan Fine, “Field Labor and Ethnographic Reality.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Volume 28, number 5, October 1999. Pages 532-539.]

“… I explore the creation of the idea of personal legitimacy as part of the market for self-taught art as a means of valorizing aesthetic authenticity, sponsored by the cultural authority of elites. This is done by situating the artists within a set of social positions that come to define their identity within this art world. Their social positions – their identities – naturalize the production of their art, separating them from groupings based on similarities of form, content, or intention. These artists are categorized by means of the definition of their identities as authentic in the production of objects, unburdened by assumptions of strategic careerism or lofty intellectualizing.” [Gary Alan Fine, “Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art.” Theory and Society. Volume 32, number 2, April 2003. Pages 153-180.]

“Readers should also be alert to some of the odd textual practices I adopt in this book. Each major chapter … highlights a generic form of ethnograhic representation and provides an example or two from my own writings. These illustrations are then critiqued as the writing rolls on. There are thus realist accounts of realist writing; confessionals tucked inside and alongside other confessionals; and impressionistic interpretations of impressionistic tales. The dog doth chase his tail. And despite my concluding protest on the folly of the abstract, the astute reader will detect a degree of formalism and generalizable narrative theory supporting the entire venture. This is a representation of writing in writing. Fair warning.” [John Van Maanen. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Second edition. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 2011. Page xix.]

“By far the most prominent, familiar, prevalent, popular, and recognized form of ethnographic writing is the realist account of a culture—be it a society, an occupation, a community, an ethnic enclave, an organization, or a small group with common interests.1 Published as a set of volumes, a scholarly monograph, an article, or even a subsection of an article (or book), a single author typically narrates the realist tale in a dispassionate, third-person voice. On display are the comings and goings of members of the culture, theoretical coverage of certain features of the culture, and usually a hesitant account of why the work was undertaken in the first place. The result is an authorproclaimed description and something of an explanation for certain specific, bounded, observed (or nearly observed) cultural practices. Of all the ethnographic forms discussed in this book, realist tales push most firmly for the authenticity of the cultural representations conveyed by the text.” [John Van Maanen. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Second edition. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 2011. Page 45.]

“Critical identity theorists treat identities as multiple, shifting, competing, temporary, context-sensitive, and evolving manifestations of subjective meanings and experiences in the social world ([see Mats] Alvesson, [Karen Lee] Ashcraft, & [Robyn] Thomas, … [‘Identity Matters: Reflections on the Construction of Identity Scholarship in Organization Studies’]). Critical identity theory is largely concerned with issues of power that constrain individuals’ abilities to freely construct and negotiate identities in work organizations. It challenges social identity theorists’ assertion that individuals freely undertake processes of self-categorization and identification. Rather, critical identity theory purports that socioeconomic, institutional, cultural, and historical boundaries between identity groups in society are reflected in organizational boundaries; lower-status groups occupy lower-level positions and identity groups are formally segregated from one another …. Identity research from this perspective often locates the root causes of stigmatization and discrimination in intergroup interaction patterns that activate social categorization processes …. Scholars in this tradition devote less attention to individual differences in personality and behavioral style. They view identities as more than just a collection of personality traits or individualized differences; they are informed by institutional, political, and societal structures …. They also emphasize how context, social meanings, power disparities, and historical intergroup conflict affect current diversity dynamics in work organizations. In contrast to social identity researchers, critical identity researchers rarely examine how threat and conflict emerge from difference in and of itself. Rather, in this tradition, difference is always contextualized in power relations.” [Laura Morgan Roberts and Stephanie J. Creary, “Navigating the Self in Diverse Work Contexts.” The Oxford Handbook of Diversity and Work. Quinetta M. Roberson, editor. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. Pages 73-97.]

“Although we retain an interest in identity regularities and patterns, we also wish to stress the dynamic character of the social world, joining those who treat identity as a temporary, context-sensitive and evolving set of constructions, rather than a fixed and abiding essence …. Identity studies often reflect a range of tacit and explicit positions on this matter, for example, depicting identity as hierarchically integrated into dominant notions of self or, conversely, as fragmented into manifold, simultaneous and shifting notions of self. Our work here assumes the presence of multiple, shifting and competing identities, even as we also question how identities may appear orderly and integrated in particular situations.” [Mats Alvesson, Karen Lee Ashcraft, and Robyn Thomas, “Identity Matters: Reflections on the Construction of Identity Scholarship in Organization Studies.” Organization. Volume 15, number 1, 2008. Pages 5-28.]

“In a space between Critical Theorists’ commitment to critical reason and radical change, the skepticism of poststructuralists about metanarratives and efforts to separate power and knowledge, and humanistic ideas for reducing the gap between human needs and corporate objectives, we locate an agenda for microemancipation. This agenda favors incremental change but, because it has open boundaries to more utopian ideas, it does not take as given the contemporary social relations, corporate ends, and the constraints associated with a particular macro-order. The preservation of the concept of emancipation (including microemancipation) from dilution or submersion by approaches that aim at other ideals and are often antiemancipatory in their effect is of vital importance. A healthy interest in avoiding grandiosity in terms of the scope of the critique must not lead to a phobia about conceptualizing the significance and influence of the wider historical context of organizational thought and action. Otherwise, the microemancipation project becomes conflated with the task of social engineering.” [Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, “On the Idea of Emancipation in Management and Organization Studies.” The Academy of Management Review. Volume 17, number 3, July 1992. Pages 432-464.]

“Here, it seems to me, is a promising new task for a critical religious studies, what might be called a revitalized neophilosophy of religion, which takes on the job of rethinking ‘person’ theory and ‘folk psychology’ in a sophisticated cross-cultural framework. Here is also a promising new task, it seems to me, for Indian philosophy – not the sort of Indian philosophy that translates and comments on one more ancient Sanskrit text but, rather, the kind of Indian philosophizing that takes the insights of Indian philosophy and utilizes them in thinking creatively about contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.” [Gerald James Larson, “‘A Beautiful Sunset … Mistaken for a Dawn’: Some Reflections on Religious Studies, India Studies, and the Modern University.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Volume 72, number 4, December 2004. Pages 1003-1019.]

“In this paper, I provide an alternative account of lust murder using critical religious studies grounded in the principles of phenomenology along with Jack Katz’s theory of sacrificial violence. I examine how the act of murder is actively constructed out of the subject’s desire to transcend hisher profane situation: emergence of the homo religiosus.…

“Although some approaches hint at the phenomenological value of the murderous act itself, no single model explicitly addresses it with a critical religious framework.…

“… the narrow scope of this paper … [is] to reconstruct the behavior of the lust murderer with a critical religious framework, and to examine how the act functions to construct the subjectivity of the killer viewed from a postmodern perspective.”

[Phillip Chong Ho Shon, “The Sacred and the Profane: The Transcendental Significance of Erotophonophilia in the Construction of Subjectivity.” Humanity and Society. Volume 23, number 1, February 1999. Pages 10-31.]

“Psychologically, … genetic fundamentalism has been too powerful to be dispelled by mere historical analysis. Part of this reflects our incomplete understanding of what makes us human. We know that gender – ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ – is a critically important category. Parental expectations, unconscious identifications, and ensuing behaviour are such that we know without a doubt that girl children and boy children receive very different parenting. Such early differences create psychologies that feel so personal, fixed and immutable that it is as though they are as good as genetic as regards their permanence and lack of plasticity. In many respects we are as good as genetically formed, and we accurately sense the depth of experience that forms us, which is what the genetic metaphor expresses.” [Joseph Schwartz, “The soul of soulless conditions?: Accounting for genetic fundamentalism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 86, November/December 1997. Pages 2-6.]

“Anthropontology is a perspective, an approach and an essential philosophical discipline. Besides, the philosophical discourse has a wholeness and it is supradisciplinary through this essential discipline. In order to justify these theses, we will here claim that the human being is social, historical and cultural being.…

“… At this point, we can enumerate our claims as follows:

[Betül Çotuksöken, “Anthropontology as a New Kind of Ontology.” Synthesis Philosophica. Volume 54, February 2012. Pages 237-244.]

“If the intensification of subjectivity is a direct response to its actual decline, it ultimately works to further this demise. It accepts the damaged subject as its own doing, and proposes more of the same. The objective loss of human relationships and experience is eased by their endless pursuit. A cult of subjectivity—complete with drugs—dopes the discontented into taking their own death—figuratively and in fact—for life itself. The immediacy of it all drives out mediacy of any of it. Sustained political and theoretical thought is not simply rejected, but forgotten. The slogans and rhetoric that replace it are necessarily abstract and formal, like the society that tossed them up.” [Russell Jacoby, “The Politics of Subjectivity Slogans of the American New Left” New Left Review. Series I, number 79, May–June 1973. Pages 37-49.]

“We can now understand the dangers, but also the potential superiority of materialist and dialectical analyses of literature. Sociological explanation is one of the most important elements of the analyses of a work of art, and to the extent that dialectical materialism allows a better understanding of the totality of the historical and social processes of an epoch, it also makes it possible to disengage the relations between these processes and the works of art which have been influenced by them. But sociological analysis does not exhaust the work of art and sometimes does not even succeed in touching it. It is no more than an essential first step on the path which leads towards the work. The main task is to retrace in each literary or artistic work the path taken by historical and social reality itself to find expression through the individual sensibility of the creator.” [Lucien Goldmann, “Dialectical Materialism and Literary History.” New Left Review. Series I, number 92, July–August 1975. Pages 39-51.]

“An important writer can be understood properly only from a study of the whole his work; this applies particularly to Jean-Paul Sartre, whose philosophical, literary, critical, and political writings are so closely related. A study of Sartre’s theatre immediately poses a number of methodological problems. Recognizing this, rather than give up this study altogether—it would take several years to do it thoroughly—I’ve decided to publish a provisory text, in the hope that this study may contribute to knowledge of the Sartrean oeuvre [work] and facilitate research to come. My reading of work has led me to the hypothesis that beyond numerous secondary changes only natural for a philosopher whose system is centered on the absolute liberty of the individual, Sartre’s thought may be divided into four successive periods, with theatre occupying the greater part of the third.” [Lucien Goldmann, “The Theatre of Sartre.” Sandy MacDonald, translator. The Drama Review: TDR. Volume 15, number 1, autumn 1970. Pages 102-119.]

“Critics generally have considered [Witold] Gombrowicz’ plays Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and The Marriage as purely oneiric, incoherent texts whose principal value lies their grotesqueness and affectivity. Gombrowicz himself interpreted the plays as attempts to present the problem of youth. In contrast to these views, I will try show that both plays are compelling satires of society.…

“… literary criticism is more a kind of Rorschach attempt at objective understanding. This holds true at least for immediate and often as well for criticism with more serious objectives. The fact is not suprising in itself. Nevertheless it is useful to recall it periodically, if only as a warning.”

[Lucien Goldmann, “The Theatre of Gombrowicz.” Patricia Dreyfus, translator. The Drama Review: TDR. Volume 14, number 3, 1970. Pages 102-112.]

“In this essay [‘Dialectical Materialism and Literary History’], [Lucien] Goldmann enunciates the constitutive theoretical and methodological principles of his dialectical sociology of literature. All social practices form significant wholes, each with its own logic and coherence, and these practices compose an ensemble that is itself a significant whole. It is therefore necessary, in literary criticism, to make a primary methodological distinction between explanation and comprehension: the elucidation of the ‘objective significance’ of a literary text demands both a sociological account of its relations with the social totality that it inhabits, and an ‘immanent aesthetic analysis’ of its own peculiar structure.” [Francis Mulhern, “Introduction to Goldmann.” New Left Review. Series I, number 92, July–August 1975. Pages 34-38.]

“… [We can have] a discussion of the practical implications of a science of contradictions.… [A] social scientist may consciously practice a mode of inquiry that involves the exposure of contradictions without thinking of it as being critical in any sense relevant to the present discussion. This result should in itself give us pause in asserting necessary conceptual links here. But it may well be that the issues can only be decisively pursued in relation to problems posed by our own bourgeois society. To begin with we need to expose ourselves to the variety of the ideological possibilities it affords.” [Joe McCarney, “The Trouble with Contradictions.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 23, winter 1979. Pages 24-30.]

“… the lesson of [Karl] Marx’s critique of religion should not be overlooked. Nor should the connection between religion and common sense as it was implied by Marx and more explicitly developed by the Italian marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Common sense is so often invoked as being the ultimate no-nonsense conception of things, alien to all forms of religious and metaphysical speculation, that the association may at first sight appear surprising. But in fact not only does religious thinking have its origins in the common sense of a particular world, but it has in turn acted on common sense, so that our present everyday conceptions contain all sorts of elements which are in fact speculative and mystical rather than realistic and scientific.” [G. Nowell Smith, “Common sense.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 7, spring 1974. Pages 15-16.]

“Sacrificial violence does not particularly seek the neat end of death; rather, it attempts to achieve the existentially impossible goal of obliteration, of annihilating or wiping out the victim.” [Jack Katz. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. 1988. Page 22.]

“In the details of the assault, the project of sacrificial violence recreates the truth of the offense received. Sometimes the correspondence is drawn in exquisite detail; more often, it is crudely accomplished.…

“… Like wiping out, a stomping is an action peculiar to sacrificial violence. Kicking occurs by accident, in sports or in joking behavior. But to attempt to stomp someone specifically seeks to leave the normal universe of routine behavior, with its multiple, morally inconsequential motives, and to enter a battlefield, where the stakes are incomparably higher—where Good and Evil fight for a final victory with a passion that understands the nature of the stakes.…

“If sacrificial violence is not exactly a practiced art, it is often a recurrent practice over careers of violent acts. The attackers, however wild and impassioned they appear at the moment, know deeply and in some detail just what they are doing. The typical killer is familiar with the victim, feels at home in the setting, and has often practiced variations on the themes of sacrificial violence.…

“Physical involvement in the style of sacrificial violence commonly precedes the height of rage.…

“Notice how each of the three conditions of righteous slaughter was dismantled in that situation. First, the attacker suddenly realized the practical project of sacrificial violence could not be successfully organized …. His rage then quickly faded, threatening to turn back into humiliation.…

“Even when the parties are enraged and are familiar with the ways of sacrificial violence, the interactive character of the relationship with the victim builds a further dimension of uncertainty into the event.…

“… Ultimately, the open character of sacrificial violence is due not to failings of evidence or to features of interaction, but to the phenomenological fact that its final seduction is the unknown.”

[Jack Katz. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books imprint of Perseus Books Group. 1988. Pages 25-32.]

“Over the past few years, the conversations about ‘spirituality and social change’ that I have been a part of have revolved largely around the integration of spiritual practice into activism and social justice work. The resulting lines of inquiry are vital to our understanding of how sustainable change happens, and should be pursued to their fullest ends. Yet I also believe that the way in which we’ve defined the discussion has pushed some important aspects of the conversation to the margins that are in some ways the essence of what is really radical about committing to a spiritual activist path.

“I have begun to feel more confident in the notion that considering the role of love in social justice work or activism is actually secondary to an understanding of the relationship between love and a revolutionary way of being. A revolutionary way of being should certainly include activism as a fundamental pillar. But it also seems important to offer the possibility that activism as a way in itself actually avoids challenging some of the fundamental unhealthy assumptions that underlie the prevailing order we are trying to change. In fact, spirituality’s gift to activism is to provide an understanding that it is within the realm of love that we may most clearly evolve our understanding of what functional and radical ways of being in the world can really look and feel like.”

[Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, “Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey.” The Love That Does Justice, Spiritual Activism in Dialogue with Social Science. Cleveland, Ohio: Unlimited Love Press. 2008. Pages 67-70.]

“… since human rights idioms, approaches, and movements are unlikely to offer either—and, indeed, do not strive to do so when it comes to inequality—they should stick to their minimalist tasks outside the socioeconomic domain, in part to avoid drawing fire for abetting the stronger companion of their historical epoch.

“This article is structured to reach these conclusions by examining a range of Marxist positions on the relationship between neoliberalism and human rights, beginning with Karl Marx’s own theory of rights, both because of its intrinsic importance of and its frequent application to current debates. After concluding that this theory offers only initial starting points for analyzing international human rights and the neoliberal era of capitalism alike, the article’s next part turns to the late-twentieth-century history of the companionship of the two, tracking their contemporaneous inceptions to examine their harmony and dissonance. The final part of the article stresses that human rights offer a minimum of protection where the real significance of neoliberalism has been to obliterate the previous limitation of inequality.̵

[Samuel Moyn, “A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism.” Law and Contemporary Problems. Volume 77, number 147, 2014. Pages 147-169.]

“It may well be true that capitalism is incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural world. But that is not the same question as whether or not capitalism can solve the climate crisis. Climate mitigation and adaptation are merely an effort to buy time to address the other larger set of problems that is the whole ecological crisis.

“This is both a pessimistic and an optimistic view. Although capitalism has not overcome the fundamental conflict between its infinite growth potential and the finite parameters of the planet’s pollution sinks, it has, in the past, addressed specific environmental crises.

“Anyone who thinks the existing economic system must be totally transformed before we can deal with the impending climate crisis is delusional or in willful denial of the very clear findings of climate science. If the climate system unravels, all bets are off.”

[Christian Parenti, “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis.” Dissent. Online magazine. Summer, 2013.]

“THE LAWS OF DIALECTICS …

“The first law of dialectics begins by remarking that ‘nothing stays where it is; nothing remains what it is.’ Dialectics implies motion and change. Consequently, when one speaks of seeing things from a dialectical viewpoint, this means seeing them from the point of view of motion and change. When we want to study things according to dialectics, we shall study them in their motion and in their change.”

[Georges Politzer. Elementary Principles of Philosophy. Barbara L. Morris, translator. New York: International Publishers. 1976. Page 93.]

“We have looked for where the apple came from and we were obliged to push our research as far back as the tree. But this problem of research also arises in regard to the tree. The study of the apple leads us to the study of the origins and destiny of the tree. Where does the tree come from? From an apple. It comes from an apple which has fallen and rotted in the earth, giving birth to a shoot. This leads us to study the ground, the conditions in which the seeds of the apple were able to sprout, the influences of the air, sun, etc. In this way, starting with the study of the apple, we are led to study the soil, proceeding from the process of the apple to that of the tree. The latter process has its sequence in turn in that of the soil. We have here what is called a ‘sequence of processes.’ This will enable us to express and study the second law of dialectics: the law of reciprocal action.” [Georges Politzer. Elementary Principles of Philosophy. Barbara L. Morris, translator. New York: International Publishers. 1976. Page 98.]

“… what are the laws of autodynamism? What are the laws which enable the stages to proceed from each other? They are called the ‘laws of dialectical motion.’

“Dialectics teaches us that things are not eternal: they have a beginning, a maturity, and an old age, which has an end, a death.”

[Georges Politzer. Elementary Principles of Philosophy. Barbara L. Morris, translator. New York: International Publishers. 1976. Page 105.]

“… we see that the evolution of things cannot be quantitative indefinitely: things which change finally undergo a qualitative change. Quantity changes into quality. This is a general law. But, as always, we mustn’t be satisfied with only this abstract formula.” [Georges Politzer. Elementary Principles of Philosophy. Barbara L. Morris, translator. New York: International Publishers. 1976. Page 119.]

“In brief, the attempt to deconstruct the production of the dominant ideology is inextricably linked to the challenge of creating counter-hegemonic imaginaries, capable of challenging both the epistemic validity and the social legitimacy of established orthodoxies and thereby contributing to the construction of emancipatory realities.…

“If ‘sociology is critical by vocation,’ then it needs to take issue with the misrepresentations of reality that are produced by dominant ideologies, which are designed to conceal the material and symbolic divisions within vertically structured societies.”

[Simon Susen, “Towards a Critical Sociology of Dominant Ideologies: An Unexpected Reunion between Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski.” Cultural Sociology. Volume 10, number 2, 2016. Pages 195-246.]

“… with the help of Cultural Theory, it is argued that creating a sustainable city paradoxically means parting with Sustopia. Sustopia often turns into Dystopia when a single perspective on constructing a sustainable city becomes dominant.…

“… It will be argued … that due to the inherently ambiguous character of cities, realizing the ideal Sustopia is bound to fail, just as any other historical Utopian ideal has failed and rather resulted in Dystopia.

“… a sustainable city is a place where Cosmopolis revives in a novel way. It is a dynamic and creative place that is inherently conscious of its global context and of its internal and external dynamics and metabolism. Cosmopolis enables living in a world where complexity and change are leading principles of (urban) development. It is a place where local spontaneous initiative and action of individual citizens, entrepreneurs, organisations and communities is combined with visionary governance and structures that promote solidarity and equality for a long-term future. The sustainable city demands more than a top-down design and implementation of sustainable technologies and infrastructures. It demands additional bottom-up involvement and engagement, but also it demands from its inhabitants, politicians and entrepreneurs great openness and creativity to engage with unexpected events. Living in a sustainable city involves being ready to learn from surprise, and being ready to adapt when necessary. It allows a degree of instability. A ‘truly sustainable city’ is as fragile as life itself and in constant need of critical reflection, creative nurturing and enlightened engagement of citizens with a well-developed and educated consciousness, celebrating life and the art of living, cherishing diversity as a strenght. In other words: a sustainable city cannot be a fixed ideal Sustopia. If a city intends to be a force for environmental and social good, it is a dynamic, ever changing place, integrating multiple geographic and time scales, where all actors are allowed to play at the ‘edge of chaos.’”

[Carijn Beumer, “Sustopia or Cosmopolis? A Critical Reflection on the Sustainable City.” Sustainability. Volume 9, number 845, 2017. Pages 1-14.]

“The rule utilitarian analysis of corporate personhood is equally succinct. Rule utilitarian theory first requires that actions comply with the community’s moral code. It is quite reasonable to see inalienable rights as the preeminent value in this moral code. To violate the preeminent value is to violate the moral code. Actions violating the code are actions judged as wrong by rule utilitarian theory and thus socially irresponsible. Corporate personhood violates the moral code and so is socially irresponsible. Lastly, failure to comply with the moral code obviates the need to perform a quantitative calculation of utility.” [Dean Ritz, “Can Corporate Personhood Be Socially Responsible?” The Debate Over Corporate Social Responsibility. Steve May, George Cheney, and Juliet Roper, editors. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pages 190-204.]

“In this chapter I wish to show that the world community is experiencing a set of new situations and problems for which particular communication theories provide useful conceptions and responses. Members of the field of communication have developed fairly sophisticated communication theories that can be very valuable in addressing them. I will describe these generally as based on a kind of politically attentive relational constructionism (PARC). But we have to move these theories in from the margins if we are to provide our critical social contribution.…

“… I use relational rather than social constructionism to avoid connection to a commonly misunderstood position and to draw attention to more fundamental relational processes of the person-in-the-world-with-others-moving-toward-a-future/past. Studying the hyphens and hyphenated is central. Experience, meaning, the very objects of our world arise out of relations and lose sense outside them …. And these relational formations are deeply political.

“I believe that PARC theories do not provide simply more perspectives for the field, they provide a way to rethink people, interaction, and social life in a distinctly communicative way. As part of a paradigmatic shift they offer new possibilities in rethinking everything from public relations and campaigns to families and intimate relationships. Some of these areas have been developed more than others. And the number of developing communication theories within this larger paradigm is fairly large.”

[Stanley Deetz, “Politically Attentive Relational Constructionism.” Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 64-89.]

“The ‘linguistic turn’ became conceptualized in the 1930s as one possible way to continue the initiation by phenomenologists to undermine subject/object dualism and the assumption of a psychological foundation of experience. The ‘turn’ as a possibility grows out of the birth of social constructionism and ‘perspectivalism’—the recognition of the constitutive conditions of experience and the de-centering of the human subject as the center or origin of perspective. [Edmund] Husserl’s formulation was an important early move in this rethinking …. In his treatment, specific personal experiences and objects of the world are not given in a constant way but are outcomes of a presubjective, preobjective inseparable relationship between constitutive activities and the ‘stuff’ being constituted.” [Stanley Deetz, “Reclaiming the Legacy of the Linguistic Turn.” Organization. Volume 10, number 3, August 2003. Pages 421-429.]

“The postmodernist is not concerned with the relation of the constituted subject and constituted world, but with the constituting activity, the original codeterminative contact from which subjects and objects are abstracted and treated as natural. All seeing, including that of science, is a seeing as; the important questions are what one is seeing as, and how that seeing is possible …. This space of indeterminacy before either subjects or objects are made determinate is a space of openness and mutuality—co-construction—which gets lost when the ‘present object’ is treated as naturally occurring in both science and everyday life. Postmodernists are less interested in advocating values and preferences than in reopening this space of object construction against the various ways it is closed, a reclaiming of indeterminacy for new determination.” [Stanley Deetz, “Putting the community into organizational science: exploring the construction of knowledge claims.” Organization Science. volume 11, number 6, 2000. Pages 732-738.]

“… the implementation of the PARC [politically attentive relational constructionism] approach is undermined by hidden forms of strategic control, especially the distorted communication and discursive closure. Briefly, we can affirm that the first is a form of strategic interaction, different from persuasion and manipulation, in which strategic intention is hidden. ‘It becomes possible through the absence of analysis about systemic and structural limits of reciprocity of interaction by interlocutors’ …. The closure of discourse concerns the techniques used in conversation, seeking only to eliminate possible conflicts of meaning and contradictions, what results in difficulties to express challenging ideas to the existing meanings.” [Raquel Lobão Evangelista and Teresa Augusta Ruão, “Organizational Communication and Sustainability, studying European public campaigns.” Observatorio (OBS*) Journal. Volume 5, number 3, 2011. Pages 265-288.]

“… I wish to outline a kaleidoscopic dialectic as the epistemological core of a post-Eurocentric critical theory. Central for a kaleidoscopic dialectic … is the relational approach – establishing relations and exploring history. The multitude of relations cannot be reduced to a series of contradictions. While classical dialectic knows only one type of relation, one should acknowledge that there are many different types, such as temporal succession, similarity, attraction, generation, or domination.…

“I prefer the word ‘kaleidoscope’ because the terms configuration and constellation already have rather developed meanings in other traditions.…

“… I would propose three characteristics that are central to a kaleidoscopic dialectic. First, the object has to be constructed as a configuration on the level of the particular. Second, it has to be linked to a clearly defined empirical field. Third, it has to be constructed historically but without any teleology out of an origin.…

“To establish relations between rather heterogeneous configurations – to construct kaleidoscopes – seems to me an epistemological device that fits our multicentric world. Incommensurable systems of science and ethics now confront each other. Factually, they exist side by side. They have their scope, for which they retain a certain plausibility.”

[Boike Rehbein, “Critical Theory after the Rise of the Global South.” Transcience Journal. Volume 1, number 2, 2010. Pages 1-16.]

“… the last decades have shown an increased interest in qualitative, applied, and critical research. Examples of this are widespread in different fields of social science, including communication, education, sociology, management, gender, and ethnic studies …. These research programs relied upon a range of theoretical approaches such as post-structuralism …, structuration …, participatory action …, and discourse studies … The ovementioned perspectives share the idea that perception comes from a specific subject position; the social and historical precedes the personal; communication produces identity and knowledge in particular ways — a paradigm that has been collectively characterized by [Stanley] Deetz … as ‘politically attentive relational constructionism.’

“Such analyses deal with a social problem or dilemma, focused on power relations as shaped by macro-structures as well as micro and meso levels of discourse and interaction. The aim of such an analysis is to provide insights regarding transformation and change. In short, a great deal of scientific inquiry makes use of critical-interpretive and applied research on issues of language, power, discourse, and context for the purpose of providing grounded, practical insight.

“In line with such assumptions, the present paper aims at outlining a qualitative practice of research called ‘diatextual analysis’ … that is specifically suited for such studies. Complementary with the perspective already started by critical discourse analysis …, which is focused on semiosis as an irreducible element of all material social processes …, the diatextual approach enables scholars to critically explore power relations associated with change and continues with a systematic data analysis that is accessible.”

[Manuti Amelia, Rosa Traversa, and Giuseppe Mininni, “The dynamics of sense making: a diatextual approach to the intersubjectivity of discourse.” Talk & Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies. Volume 32, number 1, January–February 2012. Pages 39-61.]

“The term critical relational constructionism (CRC) will here be used to refer to an interrelated set of assumptions and interests that differ from postpositivism and constructivist thinking. Instead of centring mind and ‘real’ reality, CRC centres language and discursive practices – and these are seen as constructing relational realities – including what is thought to be a person. This means that CRC is not talking about subjective interpretations and is not adopting idealism in place of realism. Rather, this is another ‘map’ about another ‘territory’ … – where the objective-subjective, real-relativist dualisms are no longer relevant.

“This discourse centres construction not discovery. CRC centres the construction of (what might be thought of as) objects – including the Self, including CRC, and including Science and its meta-theory. So, for example, the positioning of post positivism as a special scientific way of knowing can be treated as a particular language game with its related ‘form of life’ …. The discourse of independently existing ‘beings’ can be set aside in favour of a discourse that centres language based relational processes. Language and ‘real’ reality may be discoursed as inseparable by seeing ‘textuality’ as a defining characteristic of all phenomena and not just of written and spoken ‘texts’ ….”

[Dian Marie Hosking, “Bounded entities, constructivist revisions and radical re-constructions.” Cognitie, Creier, Comportament / Cognition, Brain, Behavior. Volume IX, number 4, 2005. Pages 609-622.]

“In relational constructionism, talk of the individual as possessing a self, a mind and individual knowledge gives way to talk of relational processes. Language is viewed, not as a way of representing some independently existing reality but, as a key medium in which inter-acting ‘goes on.’ In this view, language derives its significance from the ways it is used in human relationships and the particular forms of life it supports …, e.g. doing science and scientific rationality, in doing leadership, organizing or organization development. The focus on relational processes avoids the dualistic lines of distinction that discourse mind independent of body, construction as ‘just’ a mind operation, language as different from action and relating as individual action in the context of and about external, independently existing realities.” [Dian Marie Hosking, “Telling Tales of Relations: Appreciating Relational Constructionism.” Organization Studies. Volume 21, number 1, 2011. Pages 47-65.]

“In this article, we set out a relational version of social constructionism in which relational processes are the focus of our interest.… In our view, the discourse of ‘product evaluation’ assumes a singular reality that can be known (more or less imperfectly) ‘as it really is.’ This differs from the current relational constructionist discourse and assumptions, and our purpose here has been to open up to other possible approaches to evaluation. One such is ‘responsive evaluation’ – at least when it ‘puts to work’ a relational constructionist thought style.” [Dorieke van der Haar and Dian Marie Hosking, “Evaluating appreciative inquiry: A relational constructionist perspective.” Human Relations. Volume 57, number 8. August 2008. Pages 1017-1036.]

“… social constructionist arguments are not easily expressed in conceptual language. The latter is not the best medium in which to express the multiple, simultaneous, and equivocal nature of social construction processes. This article endeavours to provide an approachable introduction to what we call ‘relational constructionism’ in the context of organisational development and consulting work. It is only one view, though one that we feel ‘fits’ with the thinking and practices of many of our fellow consultants.” [Dian Marie Hosking, “Constructing changes in relational processes: introducing a social constructionist approach to change work.” Career Development International. Volume 6, issue 7, December 2001. Pages 238-360.]

“Our relational constructionist premises invite a view of research processes as ongoing processes of (re)constructing self (perhaps as a researcher), other (perhaps as the researched) and relationships …. We can now shift from the positive science interest … in finding out about how things really or probably are to reflecting on the kinds of people and worlds that are under construction or ‘becoming.’ This shift makes space for quality criteria that positive science positions as outside its scope including, for example, ethical and aesthetic considerations and local (perhaps multiple and differing) criteria of local usefulness (perhaps for all participants …). Further, given the always ongoing quality of processes, these considerations apply to all aspects of the research process including what positive science would call ‘design and planning,’ research procedures, report writing and presentation.” [Dian Marie Hosking and Bettine Pluut, “(Re)constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach.” The Qualitative Report. Volume 15, number 1, January 2010. Pages 59-75.]

“I conclude that a reconstructed social constructionism should be regarded not as inimical to, but as part and parcel of, a nonreductive biology of emotions.…

“In this article I have attempted to make a constructive revision of some aspects of the social constructionist view of emotions. I distinguished the methodology from the ontology of social constructionism to suggest that the methods should be held while the ontological background should be reconsidered. This ontological basis binds social construction and language together in such a way that important areas of social construction cannot be adequately dealt with.…

“If even the emotions of nonhuman primates are susceptible of cultural analysis, maybe it is time to revise the dichotomy of nature and culture on which classical social constructionism is predicated. The paradoxical conclusion is that in this broader framework the social constructionist problématique is not the opposite, but actually part and parcel of a nonreductive biology of emotions.”

[Martin Aranguren, “Reconstructing the social constructionist view of emotions: from language to culture, including nonhuman culture.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 2, June 2017. Pages 244-260.]

“Social constructionist claims are surprising and interesting when they entail that presumably natural kinds are in fact socially constructed. The claims are interesting because of their theoretical and political importance. Authors like [Esa] Díaz-León argue that constitutive social construction is more relevant for achieving social justice than causal social construction. This paper challenges this claim. Assuming there are socially salient groups that are discriminated against, the paper presents a dilemma: if there were no constitutively constructed social kinds, the causes of the discrimination of existing social groups would have to be addressed, and understanding causal social construction would be relevant to achieve social justice. On the other hand, not all possible constitutively socially constructed kinds are actual social kinds. If an existing social group is constitutively constructed as a social kind K, the fact that it actually exists as a K has social causes. Again, causal social construction is relevant. The paper argues that (i) for any actual social kind X, if X is constitutively socially constructed as K, then it is also causally socially constructed; and (ii) causal social construction is at least as relevant as constitutive social construction for concerns of social justice. For illustration, I draw upon two phenomena that are presumed to contribute towards the discrimination of women: (i) the poor performance effects of stereotype threat, and (ii) the silencing effects of gendered language use.…

“If gender were not constitutively socially constructed, there could still be social causes for the harms and disadvantages that women suffer through discrimination. An effort to rectify injustice would require addressing those social causes, finding other means to rectify their effects, or adopting preventative measures to avoid further discrimination in the future.…

“If race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, etc., are constitutively constructed kinds, then (as I have argued) we need to understand not just what they are constitutively, but how social causes contribute to their continued existence. Stereotype threat presumably contributes to perpetuating unfair differences (depending on the final verdict about its effects on poor performance). If it does affect performance, we may seek ways to counteract or neutralize its consequences. The use of gendered language appears to have silencing effects. The occurrence of silencing requires measures to either monitor or prevent the use of gendered language, or alternative forms of sidestepping the resulting illocutionary disablement. The proposal to monitor and prevent inflammatory speech, probably a precursor or contributing cause to mass violence, illustrates one way of addressing social causes of harm or injustice.

“I conclude, thus, that the above is reason enough for causal social construction to be at least as relevant as constitutive social construction. They are both useful theoretically and politically, and neither seems to offer a more feasible path for achieving social change through social or political action.”

[Teresa Marques, “The Relevance of Causal Social Construction.” Journal of Social Ontology. Ahead–of–print edition. October, 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 1-25.]

“The distinction here should be clear: An object or kind is causally socially constructed when social factors or social agents are causally responsible for the existence of the object or the instantiation of the corresponding properties. On the other hand, an individual or property F is constitutively socially constructed when it is part of the definition of what it is for someone to be an F, or part of the nature of being an F (i.e. what makes someone an F), that Fs stand in some relation to social agents or social factors.…

“The distinction between causal and constitutive social construction is extremely important in order to make sense of the different social constructionist projects that have been pursued and their different aims. In the remaining of this paper, I want to point out three important consequences of this distinction. First, I will argue that it makes a significant difference with respect to the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait; second, I will argue that it also makes a crucial difference with respect to the project of arguing that a certain trait is relational rather than intrinsic; and finally, I will argue it makes a difference regarding the project of arguing that a certain trait is not biologically real.”

[E. Diaz-Leon, “What Is Social Construction?” European Journal of Philosophy. Volume 23, issue 4, December 2015. Pages 1137–1152.]

“The present socio-cognitive approach to argumentation is anchored in two different traditions – rhetoric and social psychology – in order to relate individual mental processes to other types of contextual knowledge.… Briefly summarized, … [one can] focus on ‘the cognitive dimension of argument – the mental processes by which arguments occur within people.’ A cognitive approach to argumentation … allows us to analyze the ‘mental processes [that] encompass everything involved in “thinking out” an argument,’ as well as ‘the creative processes by which people invent arguments.’ This alternative perspective, therefore, does not concentrate on the argument, but on the arguers, on how people’s cognitive systems process a particular stimulus (the message), whether this stimulus triggers an argument in someone else’s head and, if it does, how the process of arguing takes place and what specific elements it responds to ….” [Susana Martínez Guillem, “Argumentation, metadiscourse and social cognition: organizing knowledge in political communication.” Discourse & Society. Volume 20, number 6, November 2009. Pages 727-746.]

“If we are taken as ensouled responsible stewards of nature—or worse, postmodern loci of subjugation—then we may forget that we too are products of and embedded in the natural world, and not above it. Here these incomplete and incompatible positions dissolve into a stratified, pluralist realism which can account both for our need for criticism of the current order and our embeddedness in a natural one. It is a human ecology in the broadest meaning of the phrase.

“I argued that it is important to distinguish between two forms of naturalism, conservative and emancipatory, but that this distinction relies upon a dualism which must be critically examined. The same dualisms recur in ecophilosophical interpretations of the place of the human in nature as well as in classical theories of human nature. I presented a resource in the tradition of philosophical anthropology which enables us to avoid dualistic thinking and espouse an emancipatory naturalism by resisting reductionism and acknowledging the diffuse dependence of human being on natural processes. In order to fully illuminate the biological prerequisites of the existentialia it became necessary to define an appropriate approach to ontology. This critical ontology facilitates a stratified understanding of the place of humans in nature without lapsing into reductivism or post-Kantian constructivism. It provides a sounder basis than either alternative for motivating an ecophilosophical perspective on human being.”

[Keith R. Peterson, “All That We Are: Philosophical Anthropology and Ecophilosophy.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. Volume 6, number 1, June, 2010. Pages 1-19.]

“Here is a new, as yet completely fallow field for research, undoubtedly rich with consequences, with whose disclosure and fruitful treatment the task of a critical ontology can first genuinely begin. The comprehensive view that is needed here cannot be achieved through a deduction from universal standpoints, but can only be won by detailed phenomenological-analytical study of the individual categories. It is self-evident that from here on out the problem of knowledge must undergo a rebirth that would allow a deeper penetration into its substantive details than ever allowed by any type of procedure that drifts about in the universal.” [Nicolai Hartmann and Keith R. Peterson, “How Is Critical Ontology Possible? Toward the Foundation of the General Theory of the Categories, Part One (1923).” Axiomathes. Volume 22, 2012. Pages 315-354.]

“The centerpiece of ‘How is Critical Ontology Possible?’ is the treatment of the major errors of the old ontology, to which we now turn. [Nicolai] Hartmann’s answer to the title’s question becomes clear in the course of his examination of these errors: critical ontology is possible by correcting or avoiding these pervasive and often hard-to-detect mistakes.” [Keith R. Peterson, “An Introduction to Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology.” Axiomathes. Volume 22, 2012. Pages 291-314.]

“… humans may be dependent on nature at the level of the biophysical causal nexus, as one species of biological creature and energy-consuming physical being among others. In order to acknowledge and deal with this fact we do not need to modify our understanding of natural agencies in profound ways. The ontology of scientific materialism does not need to be expanded or otherwise modified to include this characterization of dependence. Analogously, a slaveowner may recognize his dependence on the services provided by the slave without needing to see the slave as a full-blown moral agent or person. For the slaveowner, slaves are fundamentally substitutable and their agency limited.” [Keith R. Peterson, “Ecosystem Services, Nonhuman Agencies, and Diffuse Dependence.” Environmental Philosophy. Volume 9, issue 2, fall 2012. Pages 1-19.]

“By ‘environmental philosophy’ I mean research of the last four decades or so which explicitly examines the human relationships to and impacts upon the natural world against the horizon of acknowledged environmental crisis. This is broader than and includes ‘environmental ethics,’ a field defined by its attempt to construct an ethical theory which regards living beings and nature generally as morally considerable entities. Initially virtually synonymous, environmental philosophy has grown to include all sorts of investigations into the ontological, scientific, political, historical, economic and social dimensions of the environmental crisis.” [Keith Peterson, “Bringing Values Down to Earth: Max Scheler and Environmental Philosophy.” Appraisal. Volume 8, number 4, October 2011. Pages 3-12.]

“Values exist neither simply objectively in things nor subjectively as secondary qualities. Two sides of value must be distinguished. What is ontologically or constitutionally relative but invariable about them is that values are the kinds of things that are always ‘for someone,’ in precisely the same invariable way that geometrical categories apply to geometrical figures qua geometrical, and physiological categories apply to organisms qua organisms. Their existence is ‘relative’ to beings such as ourselves. On the other hand, for every human being striving to achieve personhood in the context of a culture, they also have a‘absolute’ sort of existence.” [Keith R. Peterson, “From Ecological Politics to Intrinsic Value: An Examination of Kovel’s Value Theory.” Capitalism Nature Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology. Volume 21, number 3, September 2010. Pages 81-101.]

“Critical ontology … can be distinguished from dogmatic metaphysics or ontology, and defines its stance ‘this side’ of all metaphysical ‘standpoints’ (including classical realism and contemporary forms of idealism).” [Keith R. Peterson, “Nicolai Hartmann’s Philosophy of Nature: Realist Ontology and Philosophical Anthropology.” Scripta Philosophiæ Naturalis. Volume 2, 2012. Pages 143-179.]

“It [the old ontology] was fundamentally oriented toward the being of material things and, in addition, toward the organism. It interpreted psychic life organologically, and it assigned the spirit to the kingdom of essences. Therefore it could not place the spirit within the world of reality. Its reality seemed to be of an altogether different type from that of things, a timeless being without change or individuality. However, the new ontology is distinguished from the old in that it removes all such limitations. It starts from the level of the given upon which it bases itself, and which embraces psychic and spiritual being just as much as the being of nature. For the spirit does not stand outside the world of reality. It belongs completely to it, has the same temporality, the same coming into being and passing away as material things and living beings. In short, it has the same reality. For this reason alone can it have an effect in this world and experience the effects of the world upon it, have its own fate and its own field of action within this world.” [Nicolai Hartmann. New Ways of Ontology. Reinhard C. Kuhn, translator. Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company. 1953. Page 24.]

“Nicolai Hartmann might be described as a philosopher who, like many of his contemporaries, joined the movement ‘back to [Immanuel] Kant.’ Unlike many of these contemporaries, however, Hartmann did not remain within the confines of critical philosophy but kept right on the road leading back until he reached Aristotle with his view of the world as a vast structure of levels related to each other in various ways.… More specifically, he sought to challenge the primacy of the episte mological standpoint; and in its place he put a type of realism, in accordance with which, knowledge is first and foremost knowledge of a world of concrete things and not knowledge of the conditions of knowing or of the structure of the knowledge process.” [John E. Smith, “Hartmann’s New Ontology.” The Review of Metaphysics. Volume 7, number 4, June 1954. Pages 583-601.]

“Ontological policy reconstruction: analyzing and/or constructing a policy’s main concepts, their meanings and interrelations (ontology), as well as the power structure associated with these (deontology), and describing the development of these, ontology and deontology, over time (dynamics).…

“When it comes to applying ontological policy analysis in practice, we are faced with the question of what to include in our ontology and what to exclude. For an extreme example, consider an ontological analysis of refugee policy that involves analyzing a form that refugees need to fill in. Suppose this form includes the line ‘Please use a pencil to fill in this form.’ Does this mean that the refugee policy ontology has to include pencils? There is no general answer to this question. Just as the scientist has to choose what aspects of reality to include in her model, a person analyzing policy similarly has to choose which aspects of the policy domain to include in her analysis, how to (re-)construct the policy domain. This is part of the creative and open-ended character of science, policy making and policy analysis.”

[Marc Pauly, “A Framework for Ontological Policy Reconstruction: Academic Knowledge Transfer in the Netherlands as a Case Study.” Journal of Social Ontology. Volume 2, issue 2, August 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 303-323.]

“In my view, neither constructing interactive kinds as a conceptual counterpart of natural kinds, nor excluding natural kinds – or ‘real kinds,‘ as I prefer to call them – from our philosophical terminology are good ideas. As I shall argue in this paper, interactive kinds are best analyzed as a special case of causal property clusters (CPCs). CPC theory provides an accurate metaphysical conception of real kinds that allows us to conceive of them in a realist manner without succumbing to the pitfalls of essentialism as well as a suitable framework for integrating interactive kinds.…

“This paper is based on the observation that the discussion about interactive kinds suffers from the … [lack of] a tenable ontology of interactive kinds. The purpose of the paper is to provide just such an ontology. I shall argue that … it is possible to maintain the notion of an interactive kind and to develop it in a way that withstands the criticisms raised by other authors. The way to achieve this, however, is to … draw a decidedly realist picture of interactive kinds.…

“… I adopt a causal property cluster (CPC) view about real kinds, which has proven to be a promising middle ground between essentialism and eliminativism that avoids the pitfalls of both these extreme positions.…

“For any form of realism about kinds (and the CPC view is realist in the sense that is relevant here), it is crucial to distinguish between kinds, on the one hand, and classifications and classificatory categories, on the other.…

“… Having explored how changing kinds can be modeled within the CPC framework, I then go on to interpret interactive kinds as a special case of changing CPC kinds – namely, those kinds that change as a result of reactions of the people who come to believe that they are instances of them.…

“… Here is the basic model. Imagine a multidimensional space of properties (MSP) in which every dimension represents a property and in which all existing individuals are located. The nearer two individuals are in this MSP, the more properties they share, that is, the more similar they are. In the MSP, individuals are neither homogeneously nor randomly distributed. Instead, their distribution is structured. In some areas there are many individuals; other areas are empty. I call the latter areas ‘realization gaps’ …, the former ones ‘realization accumulations’. The accumulations can be identified with real kinds. Moreover, the co-occurrence of properties in the individuals belonging to the kinds is not due to mere definition, but due to causal mechanisms. Consider biological species as an example. The individuals that instantiate a particular species differ in many ways – no cat perfectly resembles any other cat. Thus, no two cats occupy the very same location in the MSP. At the same time, due to causal mechanisms such as heredity, all cats share a great many properties with many other cats. This means that even though no two cats occupy perfectly identical locations, there is a relatively small region in the MSP where all cats are located. Other species occupy other regions in the MSP. In between these regions there are realization gaps, which are not occupied by any individuals.”

[Rico Hauswald, “The Ontology of Interactive Kinds.” Journal of Social Ontology. Volume 2, issue 2, August 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 203-221.]

“… I argue that … [the] structure [of attitudes] is also responsible, given the psychological features it possesses, for the practical thought and action of individuals in joint action. Further reflection on such a structure of attitudes thus tells us that shared intention presents, in contrast to what the two aforementioned views suggest, not just one but two main aspects: a psychological aspect and a normative one. In arguing that shared intention presents these two aspects, in this article I will be proposing what might be called a ‘dual aspect’ theory of shared intention.…

“… In general, we do not see the connection between an interpersonal transaction and the responsibility practices it supports as speaking primarily to what such a transaction is for, psychologically speaking. We see it, rather, as speaking primarily to the transaction’s intrinsic normative significance. Thus, as indicated earlier, we see the connection between shared intention and responsibility practices as speaking primarily to the normative significance of the former phenomenon. At the same time, the fact that we do not see the support of responsibility practices as a defining functional role of shared intention should not prevent us from seeing it as a defining feature of this phenomenon. Indeed, the dual aspect theory suggests that we see it in this latter way.”

[Facundo M. Alonso, “A Dual Aspect Theory of Shared Intention.” Journal of Social Ontology. Volume 2, issue 2, August 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 271-302.]

“I call the insurgence a ‘generation’ and not a ‘youth’ movement because generations give birth to something intimate and original, whereas youth is a mere temporal coincidence. The insurgence of a generation is not a matter of age, but of giving birth to new shared conceptions. The shared age range of most participants is not enough to consider the events as a youth movement, because it hides the huge diversity of people that got together as #YoSoy132. Calling #YoSoy132 a youth movement ignores the fact that many young people were never with or against the generational insurgence. How much of the inclination to categorize #YoSoy132 as a youth phenomenon comes from romanticized ideas of a modern youth and its naturalized stereotype of critical, groundbreaking, revolutionary, and transformational youngsters? The use of ‘youth’ as a category is a clear example of epistemological approaches that foster essentialist conceptions of those who participate in the uprising.” [Mariana Favela, “Redrawing Power: #YoSoy132 and Overflowing Insurgencies.” Social Justice. Volume 42, numbers 3–4, fall–winter 2016. Pages 222-236.]

“In this paper, I articulate a systematic model of mediated recognition based on the notion of the categorial stance. Mediated recognition is understood as a trilateral form of recognition, while the categorial stance is conceived as an epistemic position operating with the most general ontological categories and relations. The central thesis argued for is that the categorial stance can be used as a rational resource for conceptually mediated recognition. I begin with tools found in earlier research literature, then characterize the idea of conceptual rationality, consider contexts of mediated recognition, and finally, integrate the categorial stance into the model.…

“We live today in a globalized and multicultural world where the flourishing of societies requires that we have efficient ways of accepting and constructively dealing with all kinds of disagreeing parties and actors. Both as individuals and as societies, we need to be able to cope and co-operate with an encountered variety of cultural traditions, ethnic backgrounds, religious doctrines, political views, and so on. This multicultural reality also presents us with multidimensional psychological and societal challenges …. Consequently, rational ways of approaching such cultural encounters are urgently needed. In the following, my aim is to articulate some suggestions for a systematic model towards this end. The attempt is based on the debatable idea that reason and rationality have a positive contribution to make, and my specific focus will be on a conceptual form of rationality.…

“… Mediated recognition can … establish a higher-order recognitive context in which the initial disagreement at the level of direct or unmediated recognition may continue to exist, but its potential for creating social conflict is mitigated. For rather obvious reasons, the general conceptual framework-level accessible from the epistemic position of the categorial stance could be called the ontological platform.…

“… Mediated recognition based on the categorial stance can thus function as a theoretical instrument that is potentially useful in explaining, reconstructing and understanding certain recognitive phenomena.”

[Heikki J. Koskinen, “Mediated Recognition and the Categorial Stance.” Journal of Social Ontology. Ahead–of–print edition. October 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 1-21.]

“There is an alternative to the idealism of a transcendent view, on the one hand, and on the other, the normative emptiness of a view that rejects morality wholesale in favor of ‘amoral contests about the just and the good in which truth is always grasped as coterminous with power, always already power, as the voice of power.’ I cannot defend an entire view of morality here, but I make a proposal for an empirically obligated and politically emancipatory naturalism in ethics that sees the ineliminable roles of power in morality ‘itself.’” [Margaret Urban Walker. Moral Contexts. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2003. Page 104.]

“With or without special emphasis on scientific theories, more approaches to moral theory and moral epistemology now take one or another kind of naturalistic or naturalizing view, with varied approaches that defend fallibilist, contextualist, and piecemeal pictures of moral justification ….

“Overlapping the turn toward a more empirically nourished ethics is a turn toward moral psychology as a proper part of ethics. As already mentioned, some of the zest for empirical input into ethics has taken the form of mining results of experimental psychology.”

[Margaret Urban Walker. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. Second edition. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pages 31-32.]

“A naturalized view of moral knowledge provides an explanation of the gender bias – explicit or covert – that feminist critiques have invariably uncovered. Whatever theorists have claimed about the non-empirical provenance of some ingredients of their moral theories, the truth is that their theories about how to live cannot help but be rooted in the lives they in fact live. Moral knowledge, like other knowledge, is situated. Moral theories will bear the marks not only of culture and history, but of the ways that the cultural and historical situation presents itself to those who make theory from particular social positions within specific social worlds.” [Margaret Urban Walker, “Feminist Ethics and Human Conditions.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. Volume 64, number 3, third quarter. Pages 433-450.]

“Moral Understandings is a work in metaethics. Its critique of the ‘theoretical-juridical’ model of moral philosophy is meant to clear space for an “expressive collaborative” one. The expressive-collaborative model isn’t another normative moral theory—it’s a guiding picture of how we could look at morality in order to better serve two goals of moral inquiry that I assume many moral philosophers share: giving adequate description and illuminating analysis of what morality is, and serves to do, among human beings; and engaging in normative reflection on the worthiness of actual and imagined moral ideals and practices.” [Margaret Urban Walker, “Morality in Practice: A Response to Claudia Card and Lorraine Code.” Hypatia. Volume 17, number 1, winter 2002. Pages 174-182.]

“Many of the reasons for finding current moral theories inadequate should lead, I claim, not only to the rejection of those theories but to a rejection of a certain entrenched conception of moral theory familiar in twentieth-century Anglo-American moral philosophy. I don’t think, though, that giving up moral theory (in the quite specific sense of this entrenched model) as the project of ethics means giving up ethics as a descriptive and critical understanding of how moral life does and can go on. Yet the recent feminist challenge to the legitimacy of moral philosophizing itself is a deep one. It requires that any ethics done must become politically self-conscious and reflexively critical, and that the impetus to this must be right in the kind of ethics any of us do, not an addendum or a postscript to it.” [Margaret Urban Walker, “Feminism, Ethics, and the Question of Theory.” Hypatia. Volume 7, number 3, summer 1992. Pages 23-38.]

“In ‘Feminism, Ethics, and the Question of Theory’ …, I claimed that diverse feminist criticisms of mainstream ethics (in still dominant Anglo-American academic and institutional discourses) were resisting a particular underlying picture of morality and its allied ‘model’ of a moral theory. The picture is one of morality as a compact, impersonally action-guiding code within an (individual) agent. The model of moral theory that conforms to this picture is that of a codifiable (and usually compact) set of moral formulas (or procedures for selecting formulas) that can be applied by any agent to a situation to yield a justified and determinate action-guiding judgment.” [Margaret Urban Walker, “Thinking Morality Interpersonally: A Reply to Burgess-Jackson.” Hypatia. Volume 8, number 3, summer 1993. Pages 167-173.]

“A great artist is always distinguished by a clear hierarchy of values. This is especially true of [William] Shakespeare, whose whole dramatic composition is, indeed, based on this hierarchy. Shakespeare operates with three sets of values, which interpenetrate and collide with each other in the plays: they allow him to make homogeneous art from the infinitely heterogeneous values experienced in real life. These three sets of values are: greatness—that is, the ‘weight’ of human substance displayed in intellect, in passion and in the ability to take the consequence of one’s actions; freedom, in the choice of one’s destiny, in knowledge of the world and man, and in the capacity to accept action or to renounce it; and, last but not least, morality. The heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies invariably occupy the first place in the hierarchy of greatness.” [Agnes Heller, “Shakespeare and History.” New Left Review. Series I, 32, July–August 1965. Pages 16-23.]

“… since I wrote my first book on ethics, which was based on my lectures in Hungary in 1958, I have always spoken about ʻrelative autonomy’. I have always said that there is no absolute autonomy. Absolute autonomy even in [Immaneul] Kant is an idea, an idea of acting absolutely under the guidance of the moral law – but Kant adds that we can never know whether there was anyone, any time who ever acted only exclusively under the moral law. So absolute autonomy is the centre, but we approximate the centre. We never arrive at the centre, which means that our autonomy is always relative.” [Agnes Heller, “Post-Marxism and the ethics of modernity.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 94, March/April 1999. Pages 29-39.]

“What difference does the choice between explanatory realism and irrealism make? We have already seen that explanatory realism plausibly entails causal realism. Does explanatory irrealism entail causal irrealism? There evidently is no strict inconsistency in holding both explanatory irrealism and causal realism. However, the combination seems somewhat incongruous and difficult to motivate: though acknowledging causation as a genuine relation in the world, the position denies it any essential role in explanation. severing the intuitive and natural tie between causality and explanation.…

“We have also seen that explanatory realism entails the propositional account of explanatory knowledge, whereas explanatory irrealism, again, seems consistent with each of the two alternatives. the propositional view and the nonpropositional, pattern view.”

[Jaegwon Kim, “Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy. Volume 12, issue 1, September 1988. Pages 225-239.]

“The case for explanatory realism is best made—at least, can be made most explicitly—with respect to causal explanations, for here the notion of an ‘objective correlate’ of explanation has an acceptably clear sense, clear enough for explicit consideration.

“… explanatory realism seems to fit comfortably with explanatory exclusion, although it is not, I think, entailed by it. One interesting possibility is not to argue for explanatory exclusion on the basis of explanatory realism, but rather to go the opposite route, namely to give independent considerations favoring the epistemological version of explanatory exclusion and then advocate explanatory realism as the most natural account of it.”

[Jaegwon Kim, “Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion.” Philosophical Perspectives. Volume 3, 1989. Pages 77-108.]

“For the friends of emergence, to say that a given property is an emergent property of some system must be saying something significant and explanatory about the property and the system that has it.” [Jaegwon Kim, “Emergence: Core ideas and issues.” Synthese. Volume 151, number 3, August 2006. Pages 547-559.]

“If emergent properties exist, they are causally, and hence explanatorily, inert and therefore largely useless for the purpose of causal/explanatory theories.” [Jaegwon Kim, “Making Sense of Emergence.” Philosophical Studies. Volume 95, number 1-2, August 1999. Pages 3-36.]

“… we must have an explanatory theory that explains how the realizers of the property perform the specified causal tasks.” [Jaegwon Kim, “Précis of Mind in a Physical World.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Volume 65, number 3, November 2002. Pages 640-643.]

“There always is a causal-explanatory story at the basic physical level, and any purported special-science story must be appropriately related to the physical story if we are to achieve a single, coherent, and nonredundant overall picture of the world.” [Jaegwon Kim, “Laws, Causation, and Explanation in the Special Sciences.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. Volume 27, number 3/4, June 2005. Pages 325-338.]

“… if there is a problem about mental causation, the same problem arises for all the special sciences, such as biology and chemistry, in their relation to more basic, lower-level sciences; that we should look to explanations and explanatory practices, not to metaphysics, to gain a proper understanding of mental causation; and so on.” [Jaegwon Kim, “Mental Causation: What? Me Worry?” Philosophical Issues. Volume 6, 1995. Pages 123-151.]

“Nonreductivism … considers irreducibility as a sign of autonomy: irreducible properties can form a perfectly legitimate autonomous set of scientific properties with genuine causal and explanatory powers, and must be included in any complete ontology of this world.” [Jaegwon Kim, “Mental Causation in a Physical World.” Philosophical Issues. Volume 3, 1993. Pages 157-176.]

“Anomalous monism, therefore, permits mental properties no causal role, not even in relation to other mental properties. What does no causal work does no explanatory work either; it may as well not be there—it’s difficult to see how we could miss it if it weren’t there at all. That there are in this world just these mental events with just these mental characteristics is something that makes no causal difference to anything.” [Jaegwon Kim, “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. Volume 63, number 3, November 1989. Pages 31-47.]

“… what we see is this: anomalous monism, rather than giving us a form of nonreductive physicalism, is essentially a form of eliminativism. Unlike eliminativism, it allows mentality to exist; but mentality is given no useful work and its occurrence is left wholly mysterious and causally inexplicable. This doesn’t strike me as a form of existence worth having. In this respect, anomalous monism does rather poorly even in comparison with epiphenomenalism as a realism about the mental. Epiphenomenalism gives the mental a place in the causal network of events; the mind is given a well-defined place, if not an active role, in the causal structure of the world.” [Jaegwon Kim, “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism.” Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. Pages 138-154.]

“[Dave] Elder-Vass realizes that his account is dangerously similar to that of reductionists like Jaegwon Kim, but then he claims that explanatory reduction (which he advocates) does not entail eliminative reduction ….” [Keith Sawyer, “The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency.” Review article. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. Volume 19, issue 2, March 2016. Open access. Online publication. No pagination.]

“All of the combinations of ‘Can’ and ‘Should’ represent a moral standpoint. But for the most part, it is the political considerations and the personal life-histories that make people inclined to adopt one of them rather than the other. Here I can address only the merits or demerits of the arguments or refer to some general intuitions.

“There are six combinations: (a) There should be no prosecution at all, nor can there be; (b) there should be no prosecution at all, although there can be; (c) the perpetrators should be prosecuted, but they cannot be; (d) they should be prosecuted and indeed they can be; (e) they should be prosecuted in order for historical justice to be done; (f) they should pay for their crimes, they should be prosecuted, yet they should not be prosecuted at the same time.”

[Agnes Heller, “The Limits to Natural Law and the Paradox of Evil.” IHS: Reihe Politikwissenschaft. Number 6, April 1993. Pages 1-13.]

“The reason is that three decades of accelerating inequality have produced a deformed social order and a set of elites who cannot help but be dysfunctional and corrupt. Most of us don’t see it that way, because we get elites wrong. We don’t acknowledge that our most fundamental, shared beliefs about how society should operate are deeply elitist. We have accepted that there will be some class of people that will make the decisions for us, and if we just manage to find the right ones, then all will go smoothly.…

“… left/right distinctions are less salient than those between what I call insurrectionists and institutionalists.…

“The insurrectionists not only think there is something fundamentally broken about our current institutions and the social order they hold up, but they believe the only way to hold our present elites accountable is to force them to forfeit their authority. Insurrectionists see the plummeting of trust in public institutions as a good thing if it can act as a spur for needed upheaval and change. The insurrectionists want a rethinking of some of our major institutions— our government, our corporations, our civil society.

“On the other side are the institutionalists, who see the erosion of authority and declining public trust as a terrifying trend. Like Edmund Burke, the institutionalists look on aghast as pillar institutions are attacked as decadent and dissolute by the uninformed rabble. Part of what horrified Burke about the French Revolution, as he told the British parliament in 1790, was that the revolution had laid waste to the entire institutional landscape of the ancien régime.

[Christopher Hayes. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. New York: Crown Publishers imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. 2012. Pages 16-18.]

“Look, I’m a member of the elite I’m writing about. That’s a weird and uncomfortable thing for me to say, but there is no definition of the elite, no plausible, coherent one, that I don’t belong to. I’m just as subject to the same forces, so it’s really important for me to actually talk to people. And I think reporting makes it more compelling storytelling. The book’s form is weird in a way; it’s both a reported work and a work of theory.” [Christopher Hayes, “The Age of Illusion: An Interview with Christopher Hayes.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 7–8, summer 2012. Pages 59-63.]

“… the production of the world can begin only with desire requires marxism to acknowledge that the cornerstone of the project of liberation is a prior ontology of human constitutive power or desire.

“This ontology of constitutive power charts the various trajectories of human desire, and in so doing allows the project of liberation to have as its ‘knowledge’ the theorems delivered by this ontological charting of the lineaments of desire (this in a nutshell being [Baruch] Spinoza’s own program). The ontology of human constitutive power will delineate what it is that the ensembles of desire going by the name ‘human’ are capable of, and what their aversions and attractions are. The ontology of human constitutive power is thus a necessary prolepsis to any specification of the theoretical core of the project of liberation.

“This ontology has to be accorded priority in a marxist marking out of liberation as a concept, if only because a project of liberation is above all a system of truth-effects, and any truth-effect (or fusion of truth-effects) can, depending on historical and social circumstances (and the rudiments of these are always political), be prevented from displaying itself. A truth-effect does not produce automatically, and hence cannot guarantee, its own processes of actualization; it cannot of itself banish the material conditions, whatever they may be, that could in principle disrupt its realization as a truth-effect.”

[Kenneth Surin. Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2009. Page 54.]

“When I started Modern Theology in England 27 years ago (a couple of years of planning and article solicitation had to precede the appearance of the journal in 1984), the context for its emergence can be described, in ways unavoidably partial and incomplete, in the following terms. Modern Theology quickly became an international journal, but at the time of its conception there was no immediate expectation that it would succeed in this way, so Modern Theology was very much a response to a quite specific intellectual and theological situation in the Britain of the early 1980s.” [Kenneth Surin, “‘Retrospect/prospect’: Notes on modern theology after twenty-five years.” Modern Theology. Volume 26, number 1, January 2010. Pages 4-11.]

“… if one stands within the circle of faith, primacy is necessarily accorded to the theological, if one is a political materialist (for me the ‘good Marxists’) it is necessarily assigned to the political, and if one is a reductionist Marxist primacy is assigned exclusively to the economic (for me this is ‘bad Marxism’).” [Kenneth Surin, “Can a ‘Chosen’ People have a ‘True’ Politics.” Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities. Volume, 12, number 1, April 2007. Pages 145-150.]

“… societal regulation operates in tandem with its concomitant mode of economic production. Here of course the unavoidable fact is the US’s abandonment of the postwar ‘compromise’ between labor and capital, reflected in such programs as Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society,’ but swiftly abandoned when the implicit or explicit Keynesianism underpinning that ‘compromise’ unraveled in the early 1970s, as the US then made a rapid transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism in accordance with the American ruling élite’s preferred way of dealing with the ‘stagflation’ that ensued from the termination of this historic ‘compromise.’” [Kenneth Surin, “The Society of Control and the Managed Citizen.” Junctures. Volume 8, June 2007. Pages 11-25.]

“If Marxism and Christianity are superior to other formations because they are capable of accommodating a properly tragic vision, what then, in more general terms, are the marks of an adequate conception of the tragic? In dealing with this question, [Terry] Eagleton makes an important reference to [Jacques] Lacan, and argues that ‘tragedy portrays conflicts in the symbolic order—political strife, sexual betrayal and the like—with which we are invited, not least through pity, to make an imaginary identification; but this imaginary identi fication is disrupted by fear, which is to say by the intrusion of the Real.’ Eagleton also says that only ‘relationships based on a mutual recognition of the Real—of the terrifyingly inhuman installed at the core of the other and oneself, for which one name is the death drive—will be able to prosper,’ so that ‘we encounter each other on the ground of trauma, impasse, an ultimate dissolution of meaning, and seek to begin again laboriously from here.’” [Kenneth Surin, “Theology and Marxism: The Tragic and the Tragi-comic.” Literature and Theology. Volume 19, number 2, June 2005. Pages 112-131.]

“It is virtuality axiomatic for many schools of thought—not all of which are readily to be identified with the marxist tradition—that a project of liberation or emancipation can be advanced only if and when certain substantive forms of social solidarity are able to take root in the society in question. Making this axiomatic claim is easy; what is more difficult is ascertaining how these forms of social solidarity are to be generated and sustained, and, as the corollary of this question, how such forms can be protected in situations in which they are likely to be thwarted or threatened. In dealing with this question we confront (among other things) the well-known dialectic between structure and agency, or being and act.” [Kenneth Surin, “On Producing (the Concept of) Solidarity.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society. Volume 22, number 3, July 2010. Pages 446-457.]

“A theory of subalternity is thus the outcome of a productive process, no more or no less than the putative object of this process, the condition of being a subaltern. This theory, the theory of being a subaltern, is a practice, just as the condition of subalternity is a multilinear assemblage of practices structured by distributions of income, assets, power, and status. A theory, this theory, any theory, is in short a practice of concepts.” [Kenneth Surin, “The Sovereign Individual, ‘Subalternity,’ and Becoming-Other,” Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities. Volume 6, number 1, April 2001. Pages 47-63.]

“Capitalism is inaugurated in the violence of a primitive accumulation (‘sovereign violence’), and from this primal violence law and the state eventually ensue as the basis of cooperation, so that sovereign violence gives way in time to the violence of a state-maintained discipline. With the institution of law and the state, capitalism, having already been launched by the event of primary accumulation, can further evolve and expand. Law and the state allow the mode of production to be organized, thoroughly and comprehensively, according to the principles of capitalist accumulation, and law and right in turn function at the behest of these principles, in a mutually reinforcing symbiosis.” [Kenneth Surin, “‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’: Negri and Revolution.” Resistance in Practice: The Philosophy of Antonio Negri. London and Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pluto Press. 2005. Pages 205-242.]

“… mystical or negative theologies, since they do not require the category of ‘presence,’ have an undeniable ontological affinity with the space (in this epoch of ours this may indeed be the only sustainable space) of non-relation.” [Kenneth Surin, “The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred.” Review article. Modern Theology. Volume 23, issue 1, January 2007. Pages 152–154.]

“Many commentators on the resurrection accounts of John and Luke have noted that these accounts place a quite significant stress on the otherness of the risen Jesus.” [Kenneth Surin, “The Trinity and Philosophical Reflection: A Study of David Brown’s The Divine Trinity.” Modern Theology. Volume 2, number 3, 1986. Pages 235-256.]

“According to a 2011 Pew Research Survey, 75 percent of Americans believe college is too expensive. There has never been a better time for proposing major reform in higher education. Allowing students to pay for their college educations by having a small percentage of what they earn following graduation deducted from their income tax could make a difference in reducing the burden of student debt, and so could a loan-forgiveness system that allowed students to write off their government loans in exchange for working at a public service job, such as high school teaching, at subsistence wages for the same number of years they were in college.” [Nicolaus Mills, “The Corporatization of Higher Education.” Dissent. Online magazine. Fall, 2012.]

“There was a time, not very long ago, when one of the most serious and frequent criticisms levelled against Marxism was that it subscribed to a mechanical and simplistic view of history according to which all societies were predestined to go through a single, inexorable sequence of stages from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism, and finally to capitalism which would inevitably give way to socialism.…

“Now that this view of history has been widely disowned by Marxists, not only in the West but even in the East, now that it has been acknowledged by many Marxists as an aberration, which had less to do with Marxist theory than with Stalinist dogma and was always incompatible not only with Marx’s own understanding of history but with the fundamental principles of historical materialism and its conception of class struggle, the ground of criticism has shifted.”

[Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Marxism and the Course of History.” New Left Review. Series I, number 147, September–October 1984. Pages 95-107.]

“The Manual ‘Understanding Human Rights’ is envisioned as a tool for assisting learners and educators in HSN partner countries and beyond in their human rights education and learning efforts in various cultural settings as a strategy for enhancing human security. As designed, it could be a helpful starting point for understanding human rights and human wrongs, for training future trainers and for opening a discussion forum for inter-cultural exchange and awareness.

“The Manual presents a selected collection of theory sensitized through practice, and additionally offers skills-building and attitudeshaping components. The variety of themes addressed have the main goal of stimulating the search for common ground and a shared human perspective as well as presenting controversial issues from a culture-sensitive viewpoint.”

[Various Authors. Understanding Human Rights: Manual of Human Rights Education. Wolfgang Benedek, editor. Berlin, Germany: BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag. 2006. Page 9.]

“Injustices and suffering are real, but we sociologists often lack a common framework to distinguish these as legitimate social problems as opposed to the so called ‘epidemics,’ crazes, and supposed ‘crime waves’ that we are often told plague our society, but upon further inspection are not really so widespread or troublesome at all.

“My primary goal in this book is to provide a new definition for what constitutes a social problem. I define it as the violation of a group’s human rights, which I describe as commonly upheld standards about what people deserve and should be protected from in life that have been codified by some widely recognized international body. I use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights … as a paradigmatic expression of shared standards about the treatment of persons in the contemporary world. I will argue that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be used as a tool to evaluate U.S. society.…

“… are we really comfortable with … [the] position of moral relativism, which holds that no condition is inherently problematic? … So how can we reconcile the academic perspective of social constructionism—which holds that nothing is inherently problematic—along with an acknowledgment that human suffering is real, and has an objective reality? Social theorist Bryan Turner [in Vulnerability and Human Rights] … argues that this might be done through human rights. …

“Suffering, in other words, is real. Human rights, according to Turner …, are the means by which contemporary societies acknowledge our shared vulnerability to pain and suffering and act to ameliorate it.…

[Eric Bonds. Social Problems: A Human Rights Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Pages xiii and 5.]

“The goal of a human rights perspective is to provide an explicitly moral approach to the study of social problems, based upon widely-shared values expressed in well-recognized human rights agreements. But the point is not, of course, to impose one single interpretation of such agreements, or to argue that the norms expressed therein are in some way immutable and not subject to ongoing development and controversy. This approach, I argue, can enrich the study of social problems by allowing students to grapple with both the social nature of rights and the very nature of society itself.…

“In closing, I would like to acknowledge that, as anyone taking up the approach will find, a human rights orientation to social problems instruction is not without its troubles and limitations. Nevertheless, I think it provides a viable means of accomplishing what all the best classes in social problems do.”

[Eric Bonds, “Grappling with Structure, Social Construction, and Morality: Towards a Human Rights Approach to Social Problems Instruction.” Societies Without Borders. Volume 8, number 1, 2013. Pages 137-162.]

“There is a major disagreement between theorists of the international order about the extent to which global humanitarian and human rights norms influence state behavior. On one hand, theorists can point to the emergence, development, and institutionalization of international human rights law and can show that egregious violations can result in prosecutions and other negative outcomes for the officials that authorized them …. From this perspective, human rights and humanitarian norms are part of a global political culture—comprised of shared principles, norms, and legal codes—and as such have the capacity to shape the policies of nation-states (… [see John W.] Meyer[, ‘World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor‘] …). A world-systems framework, however, offers divergent theoretical expectations because it takes for granted a globe that is divided into rival nation-states more than willing to employ violence in order to promote capital accumulation and maximize territorial influence or control. From this perspective, states are much less restrained by the potential humanitarian consequences of their actions. There is, of course, the strong likelihood that aspects of both perspectives are correct in varying degrees.” [Eric Bonds, “Terrorizing Violence and the Iraq War: Civilian Victimization, Humanitarian Norms, and Social Science.” Humanity & Society. Volume 38, number 4, November 2014. Pages 365-387.]

“… [Some] peace activists in Iraq documented human rights abuses committed in U.S. prisons; Christian Peacemaker Teams was, in fact, the first Western group to break the story of the torture and systematic abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. All of the activists interviewed had one other reason to go to Iraq: all believed that by living in Iraq, they could increase antiwar activism at home, first by reframing the war in the mainstream media.” [Eric Bonds, “Strategic Role Taking and Political Struggle: Bearing Witness to the Iraq War.” Symbolic Interaction. Volume 32, issue 1, winter 2009. Pages 1–20.]

“… power structure research can make an important contribution to environmental sociology. For instance, the treadmill of production model … acknowledges the importance of policy and argues that policy generally benefits the corporate wealthy, but has little to say about the particular ways elites organize themselves to exert power and achieve their interests …. Power structure research can benefit treadmill theorists by providing a more fine-grain analysis of the ways the corporate wealthy organize themselves and exercise power to secure governmental policies that promote or protect environmentally harmful, but profitable, business activities. Indeed, such policies may result in much higher rates of environmental degradation than that which is structurally necessitated for the reproduction of capitalism.“

“Power structure research is a sociological perspective holding that the corporate wealthy exercise a disproportionate influence in public policy-making; in other words they constitute a power elite …

“[G. William] Domhoff … argues that elites organize … different power networks in order to influence state policy-making ….

[Eric Bonds, “The Knowledge-Shaping Process: Elite Mobilization and Environmental Policy.” Critical Sociology. Volume 37, number 4, 2010. Pages 429-446.]

“The Treadmill of Production Model calls our attention to the environmental costs of social inequality …. It does so in two important ways. First, the treadmill of production, or the expansionary logic of capitalism, is inherently environmentally destructive and increasingly so. This destruction, however, is not shared evenly. Owners and managers of capital have some ability to spare themselves from its worst effects, which often disproportionately affect the poor. Second, the treadmill of production creates increasing inequality—because of, for example, corporate consolidation, the increasing (global) flexibility of production, and the upward distribution of wealth—such that everyday people have a diminished ability to exert control over production as it expands. Taken together, this means that as the treadmill becomes more and more destructive, we have less and less ability to do anything about it. This is a significant economic, social, and environmental problem.” [Eric Bonds, “Environmental Review as Battleground: Corporate Power, Government Collusion, and Citizen Opposition to a Tire-Burning Power Plant in Rural Minnesota, U.S.A.” Organization & Environment. Volume 20, number 2, June 2007. Pages 157-176.]

“Despite the fact that post-invasion Iraq has not been the oil bonanza for U.S. and other foreign companies that many expected, it does not necessarily mean that oil was not at the heart of the decision to go to war. It does mean, however, that we must keep in mind that natural resource wars can take many different forms. They are not necessarily about a nation’s attempt to gain exclusive access to a foreign resource. In the case of Iraq, it appears that the United States was motivated to remove an impediment to the increased flow of oil onto world markets in order to fuel global economic growth.” [Eric Bonds, “Assessing the Oil Motive After the U.S. War in Iraq.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice. Volume 25, issue 2, April 2013. Pages 291-298.]

“The world economic and political system has long been uneasily saddled with the ideology of centrist liberalism, a ‘geoculture’ that promises incremental and moderate reforms to guarantee political and social rights ([see Immanuel] Wallerstein …). One important component of global liberalism has been the century-old effort to reform and humanize war, in which state govermnents and civil society actors have sought to promote humanitarian norms, formalized through international treaty-making, as a means of prohibiting certain forms of state violence that have been identified as especially indiscriminate or inhumane. But like the political ideology of liberalism as a whole, this is often irreconcilable with the realities of the world-system, which is premised upon the threat and actual use of mass violence between states as they vie with one another over territory and as they work to promote the continuous accumulation of capital ….” [Eric Bonds, “Hegemony and Humanitarian Norms: The US Legitimation of Toxic Violence.” Journal of World-Systems Research. Volume 19, number 1, winter 2013. Pages 82-107.]

“… from a world-systems perspective, because ‘green’ technologies are commodities, they imply relations of inequality and exploitation …. The social relations of particular concern here are of those between the comparatively wealthy core and the comparatively poorer periphery and the semi-periphery. To world-systems analysts, the economic development of the core came at the cost of the underdevelopment, social disruption, and environmental degradation of the periphery …. Taken together, this means that while the widespread development of ‘green’ technologies may create real benefits in core nations, it may also produce further environmental degradation, violence, and social disruption in peripheral zones. In other words, ‘green’ technologies, like other commodities whose production and consumption spans the globe, are part and parcel to processes of ecologically unequal exchange ….” [Eric Bonds, “‘Green’ Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange: The Environmental and Social Consequences of Ecological Modernization in the World-System.” Journal of World-Systems Research. Volume 18, number 2, summer 2012. Pages 167-186.]

“… nations and societies are not monolithic entities, and regardless of whether a government willingly or unwillingly engages in specific resource extraction activities, whether these activities are organized by local or foreign companies, or whether they occur in developed or developing nations or in nations with strong or weak legal and property rights regimes, it is likely that in many cases individuals and groups will protest, resist, or rebel against these activities. For example, protestors might be worried about local environmental degradation or health problems that result from resource extraction activities, they might be aggrieved by any loss of livelihood that they and their community may experience as a result of these activities, or they may be forced to relocate in order to make way for resource extraction ….” [Liam Downey, Eric Bonds, and Katherine Clark, “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation.” Organization & Environment. Volume 23, number 4, 2010. Pages 417-445.]

“Vulnerability defines our humanity and is presented here as the common basis of human rights. The idea of our vulnerable human nature is closely associated with certain fundamental rights, such as the right to life. Indeed, the rights that support life, health, and reproduction are crucial to human rights as such. It is, however, difficult to enforce human rights, and hence we must explore the complex relationships among the state, the social rights of citizens, and the human rights of persons. Social institutions necessary for our survival are themselves fragile and precarious, and there is a complex interaction between our human frailty, institution building, and political or state power.” [Bryan S. Turner. Vulnerability and Human Rights. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2006. Page 1.]

“Contemporary phenomenological institutional theories recover the old institutionalist conceptions of people and groups as highly embedded in wider cultural material. The important change is that contemporary institutional schemes operate by building their cultural material into the roles and identities of persons and groups now conceived as highly legitimated and agentic actors.…

“The individuals and organizations so created now with the standing of agentic actors, commonly act on behalf of the great principles that empower their agency. Far from ordinary self-interest, they often act as mobilized Others, creating expanded versions of actorhood.… The injustices, in a stateless world, call for further expansions in the imagined capacities and responsibilities of the human and organizational actors.”

[John W. Meyer, “World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor.” Annual Review of Sociology. Volume 36, 2010. Pages 1-20.]

“… the most important factor in Mennonite survival is obviously the rise to complete world dominance of the institution of the nation-state. This structure, combining a monopoly over secular power with spiritual (religious and nationalist) claims, rose in its modern form in the sixteenth century and expanded greatly in the centuries since. It now covers the globe and claims penetrative authority over and responsibility for the details of social life (family relationships, education, medicine, economic organization and so on). It has a murderous history of internal and external violence, in part because it combines great secular power with psychological and transcendental motives and legitimations.” [John W. Meyer, “Reflections on a Half-Century of Mennonite Change.” Mennonite Quarterly Review. Volume 77, number 2, April 2003. Pages 257-276.]

“A striking feature of societies around the world in recent decades has been the rapid growth of formal organization in all social sectors. In state, market, and public good arenas alike, new forms arise, and older social forms—traditional bureaucracies, family firms, professional and charitable associations—are transformed into managed and agentic formal organizations. Explanations stressing the causal role of increased functional interdependence or concentrated forces of standardizing power … are less useful in a world where organizational expansion is ubiquitous. We develop an institutional account of organizational expansion and elaboration, emphasizing its roots in cultural and environmental rationalization …. We argue that rationalization creates a framework that encourages organizing in a wide range of societies and domains …. The cultural roots of expansion produce contemporary structures that are, dialectically, built less around functional interdependence and more around the construction of organizations as purposive social ‘actors.’” [John W. Meyer and Patricia Bromley, “The Worldwide Expansion of ‘Organization.’” Sociological Theory. Volume 31, number 4, December 2013. Pages 366-389.]

“… this article examines the need for the developmentalization of human rights and what role NHRIs [National Human Rights Institutions] ought to play in this process. In particular, it will address the importance of ESCRs in the general development of the human rights discourse and the need for NHRIs to change their approach so that both ESCRs [economic, social, and cultural rights] and CPRs [civil and political rights] are given equal importance.…

“The developmentalization of human rights, which insists on a rights-based approach to development, requires a deep understanding of both CPRs and ESCRs.… Domestically, NHRIs should be key players in the process of developmentalization of human rights. The 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development is a first step in linking a human rights-based approach to development to the governance agenda.”

[C. Raj Kumar, “National Human Rights Institutions and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: Toward the Institutionalization and Developmentalization of Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly. Volume 28, number 3, August 2006. Pages 755-779.]

“The right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.…

“Steps should be taken to ensure the full exercise and progressive enhancement of the right to development, including the formulation, adoption and implementation of policy, legislative and other measures at the national and international levels.”

[United Nations General Assembly, “Declaration on the Right to Development.” December 4th, 1986. Retrieved on September 19th, 2016.]

“Extreme inequality provokes outrage and condemnation, because it violates the widely held notion that all people, wherever they are, enjoy certain basic rights. Addressing inequality is essential if countries are to live up to their obligations under the international human rights framework established by the UN, to guarantee equal civil and political rights and to pursue the ‘progressive realisation’ of economic, social, and cultural rights.” [Duncan Green. From Poverty to Power: How active citizens and effective states can change the world. Second edition. Warwickshire, England: Practical Action Publishing Ltd. 2012. Page 5.]

“… a rights-based approach anchors the debate about equity and justice in principles endorsed by the international community and codified in international law. In an era when nations are subject to a multiplicity of forces affecting the state’s capacity to address the needs of its citizens, the human rights framework helps governments and citizens to pursue justice. A rights-based approach compels Oxfam and other rights-based agencies to ‘raise the bar’ on their own accountability, lest they unwittingly perpetuate outmoded notions of charity, overlook discrimination and exclusion, and reinforce existing imbalances of power.” [Duncan Green. From Poverty to Power: How active citizens and effective states can change the world. Second edition. Warwickshire, England: Practical Action Publishing Ltd. 2012. Page 24.]

“One of the side effects of terrorist activity and the international response to it has been the tendency to pit the ideas of liberty and security against each other. The notion of human rights protection has often been presented as being in conflict with protection from terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth. International human rights standards emerged from a need, and obligation, to control violent and extreme behaviour. United Nations human rights standards were, in part, created to deal with the ravages of political extremism, violence and war of the 1930s and 1940s. Human rights instruments are structured to respond to conflict and to provide the mechanisms to ensure peace and stability. The international human rights framework is therefore applicable in dealing with the terrorist threat, from addressing its causes, to dealing with its perpetrators, to protecting its victims, to limiting its consequences.” [Jonathan Cooper. Countering Terrorism, Protecting Human Rights: A Manual. Warsaw, Poland: Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). 2007. Page 15.]

“… public diplomacy is increasingly seen as a central element of broader diplomatic activity in the twenty-first century. But it remains controversial. Debate remains about whether it is really new, or whether it is merely a fancy name for traditional propaganda activities. This chapter does not directly address these issues, but rather focuses on more practical aspects of how public diplomacy can be undertaken. It argues that the new security agenda requires a more collaborative approach to foreign policy, which in return requires a new dialogue-based paradigm for public diplomacy. In the process, some of the theoretical issues may also be clarified. To get a handle on the practical aspects, the chapter begins by looking at two concrete cases: the struggle against international terrorism; and nation-building.” [Shaun Riordan, “Dialogue-based Public Diplomacy: a New Foreign Policy Paradigm?” The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International Relations. Jan Melissen, editor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2005. Pages 180-195.]

“DEMOCRACY AND THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY …

“The principle that one dominant class inevitably succeeds to another, and the law deduced from that principle that oligarchy is, as it were, a preordained form of the common life of great social aggregates, far from conflicting with or replacing the materialist conception of history, completes that conception and reinforces it. There is no essential contradiction between the doctrine that history is the record of a continued series of class struggles and the doctrine that class struggles invariably cul minate in the creation of new oligarchies which undergo fusion with the old. The existence of a political class does not conflict with the essential content of Marxism, considered not as an economic dogma but as a philosophy of history; for in each particular instance the dominance of a political class arises as the resultant of the relationships between the different social forces competing for supremacy, these forces being of course considered dynamically and not quantitatively.”

[Robert Michels, “Democracy and the Iron Law of Oligarchy,” in Robert Michels. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Eden and Cedar Paul, translators. New York: Hearst’s International Library Co. 1915. Pages 377-392.]

“My personal synthesis reflects the emergent school of pragmatism, which eschews reliance solely on more conventional methods of sampling and observation. Instead, I have expanded the empirical inputs from historical and other archival sources.…

“With the framework of the treadmill of production, how does the current recycling policy withstand distributive scrutiny? Are there alternatives that might fare better, i.e., be somewhat more socially progressive in dealing with access to material resources? I have argued that the core of contemporary recycling is its remanufacturing element, which accelerates the growth of the treadmill of production. Large-scale centralized remanufacturing is far more energy and capital-intensive, and far less labor-intensive, than is the re-use of materials, without remanufacturing. In the latter route, materials are collected and re-used with substantial amounts of human labor (e.g., in flea markets), and far lower levels of capital.”

[Allan Schnaiberg, “Paradoxes and Contradictions: A Contextual Framework for ‘How I Learned to Suspect Recycling.’” Humanity & Society. Volume 21, number 3, August 1997. Pages 223-239.]

“My major synthesis—the treadmill of production—drew together a number of theories and empirical trends. In some ways, this was the equivalent of my doctoral thesis work on modernization. I integrated data from a variety of fields: industrial sociology, world-systemic work, stratification research, sociology of science, and macroeconomic theory and analyses. Now I sought to explain why and how environmental problems seemed to have increased so rapidly in the post–World War II period in industrial societies. The concept of the treadmill visualized a political economy driven by several core factors.” [Allan Schnaiberg, “Reflections on My 25 Years Before the Mast of the Environment and Technology Section.” Organization & Environment. Volume 15 number 1, March 2002. Pages 30-41.]

“Treadmill theory focused on the social, economic, and environmental conditions for stakeholders (workers and community residents). Simultaneously, expansion of the treadmill structure enhanced the economic and political power of shareholders (investors and managers). Political gains for shareholders included a growing capacity to induce both government and labor unions to support still more investment of this sort, to employ displaced and newworkers, and to augment state tax revenues. Over time, this increased political power of shareholders was enhanced by their capacity to obtain still more political support for treadmill expansion through an expanded use of profits for direct campaign contributions.” [Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg, “Interrogating the Treadmill of Production: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Treadmill but Were Afraid to Ask.” Organization & Environment. Volume 17, number 3, September 2004. Pages 296-316.]

“The treadmill of production model thus raises the most crucial questions that have to be addressed if the environmental crisis is to be recognized for what it is. Interestingly enough, ecological modernization theorists caught up in this debate have come to see the theoretical developments in environmental sociology arising from the reawakening of Marxist environmentalism to be add-ons to the treadmill perspective. I was surprised, therefore, to see some of my ownwork on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift classified in discussions as belonging to the treadmill of production perspective. This shows how central this tradition has become in certain debates—in that Marxist environmentalism is ironically seen as reinforcing the treadmill of production model, rather than the reverse.” [John Bellamy Foster, “The Treadmill of Accumulation: Schnaiberg’s Environment and Marxian Political Economy.” Organization & Environment. Volume 18, number 1, March 2005. Pages 7-18.]

“Treadmill of production theory argues that environmental degradation is a direct consequence of economic development. Since the economy is predicated on never-ending expansion and the pursuit of profit, economic functioning has ‘direct implications for natural resource extraction,’ the generation of pollution, and the overall state of ecological systems. The economy generates environmental problems since it continually withdraws natural resources to produce commodities and fuel machinery, and such activities also generate waste. Technological developments expand and intensify production, so the volume of energy consumed and materials used increases.” [Andrew K. Jorgenson, “Environment, Development, and Ecologically Unequal Exchange.” Sustainability. Volume 8, issue 3, 2016. Pages 1-15.]

“The implications of this economic logic [keeping all the factories busy] is described in environmental sociology by the Treadmill of Production (ToP) theory. The ‘treadmill’ is a metaphor for the values and practices of contemporary capitalist economies that drive the economy to ever-increasing expansion, the idea being that economic activity moves faster and faster but social welfare does not improve proportionately, and can even decrease as pollutants destroy the environment and threaten public health. Thus, economic growth pursued strictly for its own sake produces diminishing returns, and even threatens the environmental base of all economic activity. ‘The key claim [of ToP] remains that capital-intensive economic expansion is intrinsic to capitalist-market societies, due to the structure of the economy and the role of the state, and involves an intrinsic tendency toward environmental degradation’ …. ToP theory states that increasing generation of waste is an inherent, unchangeable characteristic of modern capitalism and therefore the system must be radically restructured in order to protect the environment.” [Benjamin J. Vail. Litter on the Shores of Bohemia: Environmental Justice, European Enlargement, and Illegal Waste Dumping in the Czech Republic. Brno, Czech Republic: MUNI Press imprint of Masaryk University Press. 2011. Page 24.]

“… the most sceptical, individual asceticism will not substantially change the structural causes of environmental degradation just because the roots of the problem are to be found in a treadmill of corporations which seldom can be changed through personal actions …. From this point of view, the ritual of recycling can be seen more as one of many individual communion activities that relieves one’s soul from cornucopian and non-sustainable sins, but does not effectively transform social structures and adapt them to the requirements of global environmental change (and in this sense, less rational in relation to goals than to values).” [Salvador Giner and David Tábara, “Cosmic Piety and Ecological Rationality.” International Sociology. Volume 14, number 1, March 1999. Pages 59-82.]

“Appreciative inquiry is presented here as a mode of action-research that meets the criteria of science as spelled out in generative-theoretical terms. Going beyond questions of epistemology, appreciative inquiry has as its basis a metaphysical concern: it posits that social existence as such is a miracle that can never be fully comprehended …. Proceeding from this level of understanding we begin to explore the uniqueness of the appreciative mode. More than a method or technique, the appreciative mode of inquiry is a way of living with, being with, and directly participating in the varieties of social organization we are compelled to study. Serious consideration and reflection on the ultimate mystery of being engenders a reverence for life that draws the researcher to inquire beyond superficial appearances to deeper levels of the life-generating essentials and potentials of social existence. That is, the action-researcher is drawn to affirm, and thereby illuminate, the factors and forces involved in organizing that serve to nourish the human spirit.” [David L. Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life.” Research in Organizational Change and Development. Volume 1, 1987. pages 129-169.]

“Imagine settings – organizations, communities, businesses – designed not only to obsessively notice and employ each partner’s most valued strengths every day, but settings that are also designed to connect and magnify the reverberating strengths of the whole, much like a terrific fusion-energy explosion that leads to the birth of new stars.” [David L. Cooperrider, “The 3-Circles of the Strengths Revolution.” AI Practitioner. November, 2008. Pages 8-11.]

“… [There are] three circles of the strengths revolution. They are: 1. The elevation of strengths. 2. Become a multiplier of strengths, from elevation to configurations. 3. Positive institutions bringing human strengths to society.…

“Millions of managers have been introduced to strengths-based approaches, Appréciative Inquiry (AI), and the positive psychology of human strengths. For example, more than two million people have taken the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), while more than two million managers have used the assessment tool StrengthsFinder for their leadership development.”

[David L. Cooperrider, “Three Circles of the Strengths Revolution.” Leadership Excellence. Volume 29, number 3, March 2012. Pages 3-4.]

“Talking about ‘positive strengths’ gets people excited. It’s thrilling to think that a new wave of management innovation and positive organizational scholarship might revolutionize the way we engage the workforce, transform business strategy, and prepare our organizations for a world of open innovation with customers, suppliers, and other key stakeholders. It’s more that just talk. Millions of managers have been introduced to principles of appreciative inquiry and the positive psychology of human strengths. Nearly two million people have taken, for example, the VIA survey of human strengths, while another several million managers have leveraged strengths-finder tools for their own and others’ leadership development.” [David L. Cooperrider, “The concentration effect of strengths: How the whole system ‘AI’ summit brings out the best in human enterprise.” Organizational Dynamics. Volume 41, issue 2, April–June 2012. Pages 106-117.]

“In Al [Appreciative Inquiry], the effects of appreciation are invoked through inquiry. As understood from a dialogic perspective, the intention of inquiry is to learn, explore, discover, and authentically understand other perspectives and to create the momentum for change …. When an investigator assumes an inquisitive stance, he or she tacitly enters a moment of suspended judgment … and is thereby cognitively positioned to be a learner, open to new possibilities, opportunities, or potential …. Inquiry through dialogue also directs the focus of discovery: A question asked in conversation brings precision and power to the process of exploration. Questions influence what people attend to …, which, in turn, influences the repertoire of actions they will take …. What we discover and live as reality in the socially constructed world of organizations is framed by the questions we pose and the way we choose to pose them ….” [David S. Bright, David L. Cooperrider and Walter B. Galloway, “Appreciative Inquiry in the Office of Research and Development: Improving the Collaborative Capacity of Organization.” Public Performance & Management Review. Volume 29, number 3, March 2006. Pages 285-306.]

“The use of large group methods such as Appreciative Inquiry (AI) for doing the work of management, once a rare practice, is soaring in business and society efforts around the world. While at first it seems incomprehensible that large groups of hundreds and sometimes thousands in the room can be effective in unleashing coherent system-wide strategies, designing rapid prototypes and taking action, this is exactly what is happening, especially in the sustainability domain. Part of the reason is that the AI process is profoundly strengths-based in its assumptions. It is founded on the premise that we excel only by amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses. But the other half of the equation is the underestimated power of wholeness: the best in human systems comes about most naturally, even easily, when people collectively experience the wholeness of their system, when strength ignites strength, across complete configurations of relevant and engaged stakeholders, internal and external, and top to bottom.” [David L. Cooperrider and Michelle McQuaid, “The positive arc of systemic strengths: how appreciative inquiry and sustainable designing can bring out the best in human systems.” The Journal of Corporate Citizenship. Summer 2012. Pages 71+.]

“The practice of AI [Appreciative Inquiry] is in its infancy. Like the curious child standing in wonder at the surrounding world, a widening net of scholars and practitioners are experimenting with the principles, discovering new questions and documenting their stories daily. What’s emerging is a thesis that asserts ‘We have reached the limits of problem-solving as a mode of inquiry capable of inspiring, mobilising and sustaining human system change; the future of organisational development belongs to methods that affirm, compel, and accelerate anticipatory learning involving larger and larger levels of collectivity.’” [Ronald Fry, “Umlimited cooperation.” New Zealand Management. Volume 47, number 1, February 2000. Pages 46-47.]

“Appreciative Inquiry begins when the organization consciously chooses to focus on the positive as the basis for learning and change. The first step includes educating key stakeholders—such as senior management, unit leaders, union leaders, and employee groups—about the AI [Appreciative Inquiry] process, philosophy, and supporting research; providing an opportunity for them to collectively decide whether AI is applicable to their organization; and, if they choose to implement the AI process, identifying a core team to develop a customized interview guide and oversee the interview process.” [Bernard J. Mohr and Jane Magruder Watkins. The Essentials of Appreciative Inquiry: A Roadmap for Creating Positive Futures. Aracadia, California: Pegasus Communications, LLC. 2002. Page 5.]

“This book is dedicated to Dr David Cooperrider and Dr Ronald Fry, the co-creators of Appreciative Inquiry, and my first teachers and mentors in AI [Appreciative Inquiry].” [Neena Verma. Appreciative Inquiry: Practitioners’ Guide for Generative Change and Development. New Delhi, India: Dr Neena Verma. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a collaborative and highly participative, system-wide approach to seeking, identifying, and enhancing the ‘life-giving forces’ that are present when a system is performing optimally in human, economic, and organizational terms. AI is both a concept, a methodology for systemic change as well as a phenomenon and philosophy of life. It empowers its practitioners with a practical process of change, learning and development, apart from gifting them a worldview, when they congruently adapt it at a deeper, personal level.” [Neena Verma. Appreciative Inquiry: Practitioners’ Guide for Generative Change and Development. New Delhi, India: Dr Neena Verma. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“The Constructionist Principle conceptually underlies … Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The essential premise is that life doesn’t just happen to us, we actually create it together.“ [Jackie Kelm. Appreciative Living: The Principles of Appreciative Inquiry in Personal Life. Second edition. Wake Forest, North Carolina: Venet Publishers. 2005. Page 9.]

“Because social constructionism suggests there is no absolute truth or objective reality, we all create our sense about ‘what’s really going on’ in a way that is unique to us.” [Jackie Kelm. Appreciative Living: The Principles of Appreciative Inquiry in Personal Life. Second edition. Wake Forest, North Carolina: Venet Publishers. 2005. Page 14.]

“What does it mean to ‘live’ Appreciative Inquiry? What does it really mean to ‘walk the talk?’ I have spent the last several years exploring this topic at a deep level and my life has transformed in ways beyond description. I believe the possibilities for personal change and growth with Appreciative Inquiry are equal to – even greater than – those in organizations. This article presents a simple three-step model I created to help apply AI [Appreciative Inquiry] in everyday situations.” [Jackie Kelm, “Walking the Talk: The Principles of AI in Daily Living.” AI Practitioner. February, 2006. Pages 5-8.]

“Appreciative Inquiry is a bold shift in the way we think about and approach organizational change. The ultimate paradox of Appreciative Inquiry is that it does not aim to change anything. It aims to uncover and bring forth additional strengths, hopes, and dreams: to identity and amplify the positive core of the organization. In so doing, it transforms people and organizations. With Appreciative Inquiry, the focus of attention is on positive potential—the best of what has been, what is, and what might be. It is a process of positive change.” [Diana Kaplin Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom. The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change. San Francisco, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2003. Page 15.]

“The appreciative approach to coaching expands on the meaning and significance of the five core principles underlying Appreciative Inquiry (Constructionist Principle, Positive Principle, Simultaneity Principle, Poetic Principle, and Anticipatory Principle) and creates a new foundation for enabling positive, transformative change in individuals.” [Sara L. Orem, Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann L. Clancy. Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007. Page viii.]

“We believe that it is important for future practitioners of Appreciative Coaching to understand the theoretical underpinnings of the practice and to be able to see how appreciative processes and tools relate to the theory. In this chapter, we present the theoretical foundation on which Appreciative Coaching is based, including certain powerful assumptions about human change. Appreciative Coaching uses AI [Appreciative Inquiry] as the basis of its methodology; however, it also draws from the advances made in the arenas of organizational behavior, psychology, and psychotherapy.” [Sara L. Orem, Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann L. Clancy. Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007. Page 21.]

“We found an underlying theme among the Simultaneity, Poetic, and Anticipatory Principles as we applied them to Appreciative Coaching. Although they function similarly to the principles in AI [Appreciative Inquiry], they bring an added dimension to individual change through their present and future orientation to time. In other words, we have observed that a coach’s own perspective of the role time plays in individual change can have an impact on the direction of the coaching strategy. For example, if the coach believes that the pace and scope of individual change is determined primarily by past experiences, she will focus attention on the past and its effect on the client’s present and future. If the coach considers the client’s beliefs and expectations about his present and future to be as significant as those of the past in the impact on his individual change, she will focus more attention on the possibilities inherent in these beliefs and expectations.” [Sara L. Orem, Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann L. Clancy. Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007. Page 39.]

“This article provides managers and executives with an illustration of a whole system change process that specifically engages multiple stakeholder groups in creating policies and programs that directly affect an organization’s strategy and cooperative capacity. To illustrate this process of democratic organizing, we provide a case study of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit, a large-system change intervention that uses deliberate and dialogic democratic processes to ignite rapid organizational change. Next, we offer processes to promote the development of stronger, highly interconnected, and information-rich organizations, coupled with examples and key questions for implementation.” [Edward H. Powley, Ronald E. Fry, Frank J. Barrett, and David S. Bright, “Dialogic Democracy Meets Command and Control: Transformation through the Appreciative Inquiry Summit.” The Academy of Management Executive. Volume 18, number 3, August 2004. Pages 67-80.]

“My own research is related to the discipline of Postconventional Futures Studies. Futurist Richard Slaughter writes that it is the duty of futurists to offer dissent to mainstream discourses. Readers might like to view this article in that light. If the reader decides to employ integrated intelligence during research, he/she might also consider it a silent act of dissent; a deliberate provocation to inspire the researcher to greater heights of creativity and insight. Integrated inquiry can also be viewed as a personal experiment with genuine cognitive capacities.

“The entire experience also requires a complete inversion of the self’s relationship with the world. Personal and planetary transformation is a core outcome of the development of integrated intelligence. The researcher employing integrated inquiry is engaging the world in an act of spiritual intimacy. Even if he/she is doing so as an act of provocation, the successful application of the cognitive skills involved is likely to transform the way he/she sits with the world.”

[Marcus T. Anthony, “Integrated Inquiry: Mystical Intuition and Research.” The Open Information Science Journal. Volume 3, 2010. Pages 1-9.]

“A hammer possesses the power to break a vase. This power depends on the hammer’s property of hardness. But some powers do not so depend on any further properties to display their effects. That is, some powers are pure powers, or pure dispositional properties. Such is the central contention of this dissertation.

“Powers, or dispositions, pervade the world. A helium atom is disposed to rise in Earth’s atmosphere. A diamond’s hardness disposes it to scratch all other minerals. A vase is fragile or disposed to break. An animal is disposed to seek shelter. However, dispositions need not manifest their effects – the helium atom may not rise, the diamond need not scratch anything, the vase may not break, the animal may not seek shelter – though they typically do manifest when something triggers the causal basis of the disposition. The causal basis consists of some set of properties underlying the disposition that enables it to manifest. So a vase is fragile because it is disposed to break when a hammer or other suitable object strikes it, where the causal basis for fragility consists of the underlying micro-structural properties of the vase. Moreover, the micro-structural properties seem to anchor the being or continued existence of the vase’s fragility when the vase is not actually breaking.

“In contrast to this intuitive example, the Pure Dispositions Thesis claims that some dispositions do not require causal bases in any categorical or dispositional properties.”

[William A. Bauer. The Ontology of Pure Dispositions. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Nebraska. Lincoln, Nebraska. August, 2010. Page 1.]

“Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted diff erent slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly. That march and demarche of democracy is the story of modern politics or at least one of its stories.

“This book is about the second half of that story, the demarche, and the political ideas—variously called conservative, reactionary, revanchist, counterrevolutionary—that grow out of and give rise to it. These ideas, which occupy the right side of the political spectrum, are forged in battle. They always have been, at least since they first emerged as formal ideologies during the French Revolution, battles between social groups rather than nations; roughly speaking, between those with more power and those with less. To understand these ideas, we have to understand that story. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

[Corey Robin. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pages 3-4.]

“Even though this power to define the objects of public fear suggests that danger or harm is whatever the state says it is, [Thomas] Hobbes did believe that there were real dangers that threatened a people.…

“Hobbes also assumed that the sovereign would be so removed from powerful constituencies in society – in his time, the church and the aristocracy – that the sovereign would be able to act on behalf of an impartial, disinterested, and neutral calculation of what truly threatened the people as a whole and of what measures would protect them.…

“To cite just one example: it is a well known fact that African Americans have suffered as much from the American state’s unwillingness to protect them from basic threats to their lives and liberties as they have from the willingness of white Americans to threaten those lives and liberties.…

“In the Hobbesian account, this constitutes a grievous failure; in America, it has been a semi-permanent boundary of state action.”

[Corey Robin, “Yours, Mine, But Not Ours: Why the Politics of National Security Inevitably Means that We’re All Living in Failed Hobbesian States.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 9, winter 2013. Pages 22-28.]

“The true and perspicuous Explication of the Elements of Laws Natural and Politick (which is my present Scope) dependeth upon the Knowledge of what is Human Nature, what is Body Politick, and what it is we call a Law; concerning which Points, as the Writings of Men from Aritiquity downwards have still increased, so also have the Doubts and Controversies concerning the same: And seeing that true Knowledge begetteth not Doubt nor Controversy, but Knowledge; it is manifest from the present Controversies, that they which have heretofore written thereof, have not well understood their own Subject.

“… Harm I can do none, though I err no less than they; for I leave Men but as they are, in Doubt and Dispute: but, intending not to take any Principle upon Trust, but only to put Men in mind of what they know already, or may know by their own Experience, I hope to err the less; and when I do, it must proceed from too badly Concluding, which I will endeavour as much as I can to avoid.

“… On the other Side, if Reasoning aright win not Consent, which may very easily happen, from them that being confident of their own Knowledge weigh not what is said, the Fault is not mine but theirs; for as it is my Part to shew my Reasons, so it is theirs to bring Attention.”

[Thomas Hobbes. The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury Never before collected together. To which is prefixed, The Author’s Life, Extracted from that said to be written by Himself. London: Thomas Hobbes. 1750. Page 1.]

“Amongst those who’ve recently been organizing against state austerity measures and social oppression in Northern California, an expression has emerged: “Revolution in the fall, counter-revolution in the spring.” The phrase attempts to plot the rhythms of protest and its repression in the Bay, where building reclamations, street actions, and brief strikes have taken shape in the months of October and November, while, by March, our energies have tended to be consumed with court support and campaigns against prosecutions. In the UK, the student protests of late 2010 and the subsequent rounds of criminalization followed a similar pattern, although some of the prosecutions have dragged on for almost two years as the Crown Prosecution Services tries again and again to run cases that have previously ended in hung juries (no overall agreement) or have stalled for technical reasons.” [Amanda Armstrong and Nina Power, “Radicalizing Repression: How State Repression Sets off Radiating Outrage towards Police, Prosecutors, and the Social Order They Reproduce.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 9, winter 2013. Pages 29-34.]

“The dialectical unity of consciousness and being, of subject and object, must be based on the reality of both elements …; these elements are distinct but are also in unity with each other.…

“Our description of [Karl] Marx’s theory as ‘humanist’ accords with his own description in his early writings. I have shown in detail how Marx differed both from idealism and from abstract, metaphysical materialism. While it is true that he differed from them, he also represented their synthesis. But in making the synthesis he avoided the one-sidedness of each of them and brought consciousness and being into a real unity, that of living man. In his own words, ‘we see here how consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and from materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both.’ …

“… Consciousness is conscious being, a constituent part of being. We can only understand the interaction among the various elements correctly if we first recognise their unity. I shall therefore attempt to ascertain this correlative unity between legal and political relations and the ideas which correspond to them.…

“… There is no social being without consciousness and, conversely, consciousness is nothing but conscious being.…

“… The unity of being and consciousness now shows itself to be not a merely external relationship but an inseparable association.…

“Only revolution, the actual removal of reification, can make the communist consciousness general. Once this happens, it is no longer class consciousness but human consciousness.”

[Franz Jakubowski. Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism. Pacifica, California: Marxists Internet Archive (Marxists.org) ebook edition. 1936.]

“Ideology and Superstructure was first published in Danzig in 1936 as the outcome of a doctoral thesis.…

“So strongly anti-economistic and anti-naturalistic is [Franz] Jakubowski’s conception that he practically abandons historical materialism altogether in favour of a theory in which subjective consciousness plays the determining role in historical development. In his concern to stress that consciousness is a part of social being, social being is all but dissolved into human consciousness, and we are offered, for example, a somewhat Sartrean conception of the economy ….”

[Kate Soper, “Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism.” Review article. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 17, summer 1977. Pages 46-47.]

“The concept of homosociality describes and defines social bonds between persons of the same sex. It is, for example, frequently used in studies on men and masculinities, there defined as a mechanism and social dynamic that explains the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. A popular use of the concept is found in studies on male friendship, male bonding, and fraternity orders. It is also frequently applied to explain how men, through their friendships and intimate collaborations with other men, maintain and defend the gender order and patriarchy …. However, this common and somewhat overexploited use of the concept referring to how men, through their relations to other men, uphold patriarchy tends to simplify and reduce homosociality to an almost descriptive term that is used to show how men bond, build closed teams, and defend their privileges and positions.” [Nils Hammarén and Thomas Johansson, “Homosociality: In Between Power and Intimacy.” SAGE Open. January–March 2014. Pages 1-11.]

“… social-relational dialectics can help answer the question of change in world politics precisely because of its focus on the principles of interconnectivity and mediation within the social realm. Of analytic importance are the social relations within world politics and what their immanent tendencies portend for future developments.…

“… As suggested at the beginning of this article, the unique contribution of social-relational dialectics is that it offers an alternate social ontology, one which centres on social relations as being generative of change, thus allowing IR [international relations] to explore more adequately the dynamic processes at work within world politics.”

[Shannon Brincat, “Towards a social-relational dialectic for world politics.” European Journal of International Relations. Volume 17, number 4, 2010. Pages 679-703.]

“‘AUTOMATION’ is a new word in the English language. It originated in the United States and has recently been widely used but it has not as yet found its way into the current books of reference. Indeed it has a number of different meanings, ranging from conveyor-belt production to highly complicated forms of automatic machinery. The word has various synonyms such as ‘cybernetics,’ ‘automatic control,’ ‘control engineering,’ ‘automisation’ and many more. It appears, however, that ‘automation’ is now ousting the other words as an expression denoting a technical development which is replacing human labour by machinery in factories and workshops in a way that would have been thought impossible only ten years ago.” [Frederick Pollock. Automation: A Study of its Economic and Social Consequences. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, translators. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers. 1957. Page 3.]

“In this book, imperialism is defined as follows: the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country. In short, empires do not just pursue power for power’s sake. There are real material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over. Behind Colonel Blimp there stood the East India Company and the Bank of England. Behind Teddy Roosevelt and the US Marines there stood the United Fruit Company and Wall Street. The intervention is intended to enrich the investors and keep the world safe for them.

“For centuries the ruling interests in Western Europe and, later on, North America and Japan laid claim to most of planet Earth, including the labor of indigenous peoples (as workers or slaves), their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), their markets, and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, slaves, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, fruits, tobacco, palm oil, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently, uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and—say it again—oil, and numerous other things.”

[Michael Parenti. The Face of Imperialism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 7-8.]

“In the field of psychology, the topic of everyday life as a specific subject of inquiry has been afforded little attention. Indeed, everyday life has recently been analyzed mainly in psychological studies that examine people’s ways of behaving and thinking when they act in situations termed as mundane and ordinary. These studies are mainly carried out in two fields of social psychology which we refer to in general terms as Social Cognition and Social Representation Theory. The aim of this paper is to examine how both these fields treat some of the features commonly attributed to everyday life. In particular, the features of familiarization, continuity and stability over time and automaticity are discussed in order to try to figure out meeting points between the two fields mentioned.…

“Both the analysis of classic and modern novels and the research conducted with questionnaires and interviews showed familiarity as the essential feature of everyday life. This relevance depends on the fact that everything happening in everyday life undergoes a process of familiarization that works both on a cognitive and on an affective level. Indeed, this is a usual process whereby we explain what we perceive as new and outside of our custom by reference to more familiar categories.”

[Francesca Emiliani and Stefano Passini, “Everyday Life in Social Psychology.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 1, 2017. Pages 83-97.]

“Dialectical materialism is, of course, the philosophy of Marxism, and, as such, is well known. However, the account of this philosophy to be found here will differ fundamentally from many of the accounts which are currently fashionable. In the first place, it is genuinely materialist; and in the second place, it takes dialectic seriously. Beyond insisting on these points, however, I do not spend much time trying to prove the Marxist credentials of my views. My concern is with the philosophical issues involved in the ideas that I discuss, rather than with their pedigree. My aim is to show that the approach I am defending, however it is labelled, is capable of providing a satisfactory and illuminating account of knowledge….

“In this book I deal with some of the central problems in the theory of knowledge. I cover the sort of ground that a student would encounter in an introductory epistemology course. Moreover, I argue for a view of knowledge – namely realism – which is a familiar, even a common sense one. However, in the course of pursuing these arguments, I have been obliged to explore ideas and to put forward theories which will, most likely, be novel and unfamiliar to many readers. For my aim is to develop and defend a dialectical and materialist account of knowledge.

“I, too, will draw substantially on [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s philosophy in what follows, with the aim of extending and deepening the realist and reflectionist theory of knowledge. For Hegel’s work constitutes by far the most profound and far-reaching development of the philosophy of dialectic, and it provides particularly important ideas for the defence of realism. Despite the much talked-about revival of interest in Hegel which is supposed to have occurred among English-speaking philosophers in recent times, his theories are still not well understood. In particular, his ideas on the theory of knowledge are among the least discussed and least known aspects of his thought. It is even claimed that Hegel repudiated epistemology, and that he was merely sceptical in his views; but there is no basis for such assertions. There is nothing of the sceptic in Hegel.… [H]e repudiates epistemology only in its traditional form, as the search for absolute and immutable foundations upon which knowledge can be securely based. In place of this, however, he develops a historical account of knowledge, a dialectical epistemology.

“This contains lessons of the greatest importance for realism. For the dialectical approach offers the only framework within which it is possible to answer the arguments which are so regularly brought against realism. In particular, Hegel develops an important critique of Kant’s epistemology, which deserves to be much better known among philosophers than it is. I hope that my book will help to illuminate this aspect of Hegel’s work. For, in so far as Hegel’s ideas can be used to support a realist and materialist outlook, I have relied heavily upon them. In so doing, I have tried to make their meaning clear and available to an English-speaking audience. Indeed, I have gone out of my way, at times, to mention his views and to give some account of them.”

[Sean Sayers. Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge. New York: Basil Blackwell Inc. 1985. Pages x-xii.]

“… the dialectical theory of knowledge also rejects the Kantian view that, in the process of knowledge, thought creates an ‘object of knowledge,’ which may or may not reflect objective reality, but whose relation to things-in-themselves remains essentially unknowable. The view that I have been presenting, by contrast, implies that the ‘object’ created by thought in the process of knowledge necessarily in some degree reflects the nature of the thing-in-itself. The patterns and categories of our thought, by means of which we attempt to understand the world, are never purely subjective; they always, in some measure, reflect objective reality. Thought, theory, ‘ways of seeing things’ – indeed, reason itself – as well as mere sensory awareness, are all reflections of reality.

“Again, the relationship here is a necessary one. Our thought is always and necessarily a reflection of reality. False and mistaken ideas, as well as true ones, therefore, reflect reality. There are no mere appearances, no pure illusions, no sheer errors.”

[Sean Sayers. Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge. New York: Basil Blackwell Inc. 1985. Page 43.]

“… the historical view of knowledge can accommodate and acknowledge the truth in both the absolute and the relative views, while avoiding the one-sidedness which characterizes them both. Ultimately, our beliefs and ideas are only partial and relative; and they are destined to be revealed as such by the future advance of knowledge. However, given our present experience and present level of theoretical understanding, some of these views, at least, are objective, rational, justified and true.” [Sean Sayers, “F. H. Bradley and the Concept of Relative Truth.” Radical Philosophy. Volume 59, autumn 1991. Pages 15-20.]

“It [Marxism] claims to be both a social theory and an evaluative perspective, and to contain both of these within the unity of a single whole. It involves an immanent critical method which holds that existing conditions themselves contain the basis for a critical perspective. The existing social order is not simple and static it contains tensions and conflicts. It includes negative as well as positive aspects; tendencies which oppose and negate it, as well as forces supporting and sustaining it. That is to say, negative and critical tendencies are in the world. They do not have to be brought from outside, they are already contained immanently within existing conditions. This is the vital insight of the Hegelian dialectical approach.” [Sean Sayers. Marxism and Human Nature. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1998. Page 18.]

“In much of the literature on alienation, Marxism is assumed to involve the notion of a universal ‘human essence’: an unchanging set of human potentialities, whose realization is denied in conditions of alienation.…

“However, the view of human nature that I have just been describing points towards a different picture. According to it, not only needs but also powers and potentialities are in a process of social and historical development. When [Karl] Marx criticizes capitalism for preventing the realization of human powers and potentialities, these are ones which have been developed within capitalism itself. Here again the basis for Marx’s approach is historical and relative, not transhistorical and absolute. Moreover, understood in this way, alienation is not a purely negative and critical concept, the mere opposite of self-realization. On the contrary: it constitutes a stage in human self-development which is necessary and progressive relative to the stage it supersedes.”

[Sean Sayers, “Moral Values and Progress.” New Left Review. Series I, number 204, March–April 1994. Pages 67-85.]

“If repetition of life-historical situations is impossible, then natural scientific criteria of verifiability and falsifiability of hypotheses become irrelevant and we must find other criteria by which we may know that we are speaking ‘the truth.’ To do this we have to distinguish between two types of rationality which are each appropriate to a field of discourse different from but inter-related with that of the other. These types we call analytical and dialectical rationality.…

“By analytical rationality we mean a logic of exteriority according to which truth lies, according to certain criteria, in propositions formed outside the reality with which they are concerned.…

“Dialectical rationality is concrete in the sense that it is nothing more than its actual functioning in the world of actual entities. It is a method of knowing, where by knowing, we understand the grasping of intelligible structures in their intelligibility.”

[David Cooper, “Two types of rationality.” New Left Review. Series I, number 29, January–February 1965. Pages 62-68.]

“Like any scientific theory (such as genetics), complexity theory can be deployed for different political purposes. We would distinguish between a conservative and ideological complexity theory that uses newscientific and technological insights to legitimate the system of global capitalism and a critical complexity theory that interprets bottom-up power and intelligence in terms of direct democracy and not a swarmlike hive. Such a critical theory, which we ourselves support, would emphasize the need for sustainability and the construction of an ecologically viable economy and just society while criticizing destructive aspects of the newtechnology and society.…

“Changes from one social system to another are not a result of self-organization, critical thresholds, or evolutionary peaks, but rather they are determined by socioeconomic crisis, profound discontent, class struggle, and political upheaval.”

[Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “Kevin Kelly’s Complexity Theory.” Organization & Environment. Volume 12, number 2, June 1999. Pages 141-162.]

“To begin, the Internet constitutes a dynamic and complex space in which people can construct and experiment with identity, culture, and social practices …. It also makes more information available to a greater number of people, more easily, and from a wider array of sources, than any instrument of information and communication in history …. On the other hand, information-communication technologies have been shown to retard face-to-face relationships …, threaten traditional conceptions of the commons …, and extend structures of Western imperialism and advanced capitalism to the ends of the earth …. The challenge at hand is to begin to conceive the political reality of media such as the Internet as a complex series of places embodying reconstructed models of citizenship and new forms of political activism, even as the Internet itself reproduces logics of capital and becomes co-opted by hegemonic forces. In this sense, we should look to how emergent technologies and communities are interacting as tentative forms of self-determination and control “from below”—recognizing that as today’s Internet citizen-activists organize politically around issues of access to information, capitalist globalization, imperialist war, ecological devastation, and other forms of oppression, they represent important oppositional forms of agency in the ongoing struggle for social justice and a more participatory democracy ….” [Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach.” News Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education. Zane C. Wubbena, Derek R. Ford, and Brad J. Porfilio, editors. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, Inc. 2016. Pages 213-235.]

“Complexity theory is a new way of looking at how complex structures form, adapt, and change. While it appears to have clear applicability to explaining natural phenomena such as the formation and properties of molecules and the creation of biological systems, it remains to be seen whether it can be successfully applied to organizations. While the literature is filled with calls for changing the paradigm of organization management from one of control to one of self-organizing, there is a paucity of empirical data confirming that organizations designed on this new model are more effective and efficient. There is a view that putting aside whether this results in more efficiency and effectiveness, self-design is more in line with emerging philosophical and ethical views about the workplace. In a normative sense, a complexity theory view can be considered more humanitarian and ethical. Writers in the field, in addition, suggest that organizational designs based on this new paradigm are likely to be more efficient and effective in turbulent environments.” [Gary M. Grobman, “Complexity Theory: A New Way to Look at Organizational Change.” Public Administration Quarterly. Volume 29, number 3/4, fall 2005–winter 2006. Pages 350-382.]

“The invisible backhand that destroys the family and the invisible hand that creates the market are actually one.

“Translated into the language of complexity theory, this is an example of a ‘dissipative structure’—a form of order that unexpectedly emerges as disorder increases. Were the equivalent to happen in the entropy of the state, the resulting dissipative structures would appear as unintended forms of social order. Whereas serialization and pluralism imply that the state is either reduced to a heap, or else consumed by pre-existing social formations, this model opens up a third possibility between atomization and absorption.”

[Malcolm Bull, “States of Failure.” New Left Review. Series II, number 40, July–August 2006. Pages 5-25.]

“Though framed by controversial academic and political discourse, the sexual harassment regime develops in the lives of real people. This development is pushed, shaped, and highlighted by contentious cases making their way to courts. A cycle of emerging perplexing problems not satisfactorily resolvable by the suggestions offered in the last round of advancement is a salient feature of this development and is integral to the continual reframing of the debate. The quid pro quo form of harassment, once accepted, became fairly easy to understand and detect. Hostile environment sexual harassment has proven more difficult. Cases of bi-sexual harassment, equal opportunity harassment (i.e. targets both sexes with sexual behavior), intersectional harassment (i.e. is motivated by sex and some other characteristic), same sex harassment, non-sexualized harassment, and so forth represent significant challenges for the paradigm and are the factual pivots around which policy debates revolve. The sexy workplace scenario introduced here is an iteration of this cycle.” [Lua Kamál Yuille, “Sex in the Sexy Workplace.” Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy. Volume 9, issue 1, article 4, summer 2013. Pages 88-121.]

“Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed differentiates between the banking way of knowledge instruction (a pedagogy of lectures and expertise transmitted, i.e., ‘Open brain, deposit knowledge’) and conscientization that occurs through relationships, reflection, shared knowledge, and action.

“But what about the pedagogy of the oppressor? How does conscientization occur when one is safe in the pew or the lecture hall, looking forward to a Sunday roast or hamburger at lunch? When it comes to the eating of other animals and the use of animal products, we each learned their legitimacy through the banking method of knowledge—someone else deposited into our minds (and stomachs) the ‘fact’ of the normativeness and naturalness of the edibility of the flesh of dead animals, their milk and eggs.…

“… Christians are perfectly happy eating vegan food as long as they don’t know that is what they are doing.”

[Carol J. Adams, “The Poetics of Christian Engagement: Living Compassionately in a Sexual Politics of Meat World.” Studies in Christian Ethics. OnlineFirst edition. November, 2016. Pages 1-15.]

“A definitive—indeed any—answer to this question is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, the pages that follow suggest that insight can be found in the analysis of the pedagogy of citizenship law. At the core of this unique methodology for legal analysis is the conviction that law is an educative process aimed at and resulting shaping and managing behaviors to ends deemed best for society. From this perspective the inputs that constitute the market for citizenship are not merely accidents reflecting the ambivalence about citizenship. Instead, they have significant, tangible, and constitutive impacts on societal understanding and commitment to the ideals represented by citizenship.…

“To suggest that law operates as a ‘societal pedagogy,’ as the pedagogy of law does, it serves to establish what is meant by the concept of pedagogy.… When that process has a purposeful outcome, education becomes pedagogy.”

[Lua Kamál Yuille, “Individuals, Corporations and the Pedagogy of Citizenship.” Kansas Law Review. Volume 63, May 2015. Pages 903-915.]

“There is no mediating logic between the anthropology of human conflict, stemming from [Baruch] Spinoza’s theory of the passions, and the genesis of dominating groups. Rather than a trans-historical notion of group formation, something like a class theory is needed; but Spinozism cannot provide it. A comparable ambiguity is generated when Lordon refers to capital as a ‘social group,’ that is to say as a fraction, or hostile part within the multitude itself. But if capital is a group within the multitude then it cannot be the product of imperium. Again, without a critical theory of class formation, we risk treating capital as either a species of state, or as an inexplicable excrescence of the multitude.” [Alberto Toscano, “A Structuralism of Feeling?” New Left Review. Series II, number 97, January–February 2016. Pages 73-93.]

“‘Peace and Power’ is an emancipatory group process drawn from several traditions around the world for working together in cooperative and peaceful ways, and in ways that challenge the status quo and lead to social and political change in the direction of equality and justice for all.…

“… [The] tension between the powers derived from public and private experience forms a dialectic, calling for a resolution in the form of a synthesis. As a group works within a ‘Peace and Power’ framework, they cannot set aside the learned power-over processes. Instead, the group continually examines what they do in light of what they know: they know both forms of power, and they work out as a group how they exercise both forms of power in the group. They act with awareness of the tensions between power-over power and peace power, and in practice might choose to use either of the forms of power but with full awareness. From that awareness (knowing) they create a mutually agreed path to shift and shape their actions based on the intention of peace.”

[Peggy L. Chinn and Adeline Falk-Rafael, “Peace and Power: A Theory of Emancipatory Group Process.” Journal of Nursing Scholarship. Volume 47, issue 1, January 2015. Pages 62-69.]

“The very notion of ‘pre-terrorism’ is deeply symptomatic: it makes patent the link between the obsessive identification of ‘dangerous individuals’ and the imagination of future revolts that call for repressive pre-emption.… Indeed, as an antiterrorist magistrate recently confessed: ‘There is a temptation during a time of crisis to consider any illegal manifestation of political expression to be of a terrorist nature.’ Reading the extracts from the secret service reports, the left pessimist might be heartened to see such confidence in the possibility of radical revolt being shown by the state and its agencies. Alternatively, she might muse that the logic of immunizing oneself against ‘terrorism’ by nipping pre-terrorism in the bud ….” [Alberto Toscano, “The war against pre-terrorism The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection.” Radical Philosophy. Number 154, March/April 2009. Pages 2-7.]

“It is within … [the] murky inverted present and swamp of bad memory that the various social movements that make up the slow reassertion of the radical Left in France have had to find their way.” [Kristin Ross, “Managing the present.” Radical Philosophy. Number 149, May/June 2008. Pages 2-5.]

“In this brief essay I cannot take up the important but difficult question of how the economic/cultural distinction is best applied to the critical theory of contemporary capitalist society. In ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,’ however, I discuss this question at length. Rejecting the view of economy and culture as separate spheres, I propose a critical approach that reveals the hidden connections between them. The point, in other words, is to use the distinction against the grain, making visible, and subject to critique, both the cultural subtexts of apparently economic processes and the economic subtexts of apparently cultural processes. Such a ‘perspectival dualism’ is only possible, of course, once we have the economic/cultural distinction.” [Nancy Fraser, “Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler.” New Left Review. Series I, number 228, March–April 1998. Pages 140-149.]

“Given the hollowness of a purely verbal reduction and the present unavailability of a substantive reduction, what normative approach remains for those who seek to integrate distribution and recognition? For the present, I contend, one should refrain from endorsing either one of those paradigms of justice to the exclusion of the other. Instead, one should adopt what I shall call a ‘bivalent’ conception of justice. A bivalent conception of justice encompasses both distribution and recognition without reducing either one of them to the other. Thus, it does not treat recognition as a good to be distributed, nor distribution as an expression of recognition. Rather, a bivalent conception treats distribution and recognition as distinct perspectives on, and dimensions of, justice, while at the same time encompassing both of them within a broader, overarching framework.” [Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Stanford University. Stanford, California. April 30th–May 2nd, 1996. Pages 1-67.]

“For those working in the social sciences and humanities – from social and political theorists to philosophers – identity is a topic that remains of fundamental significance and of enduring relevance to the world in which we live. The great foundational figures of philosophy and social thought – from Aristotle to [Immanuel] Kant to [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel – all underscored the essential importance of identity to the attainment of human reflectiveness, personal autonomy and political freedom. Similarly, the great figures of classical social theory such as [Karl] Marx, [Max] Weber, [David ‘Émile’] Durkheim and [Sigmund] Freud all developed conceptual accounts of world affairs that underscored the centrality of identity – at once individual and collective – to social relations and cultural praxis. According to classical social theory, the conditions, contours and consequences of identity were to undergo radical transformation as a result of social forces like capitalism, rationalization, the growing complexity of cultural organization, and the redrafting of the human passions and repressed desire. Identity demanded analysis, so it was claimed, because it was at the core of how people experienced – reacted to, and coped with – the early modern industrial transformations sweeping the globe.” [Anthony Elliott. Identity Transformations: A compilation of chapters from works by Anthony Elliott. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 5.]

“My claim is that every form of capitalist society harbours a deep-seated social-reproductive ‘crisis tendency’ or contradiction: on the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. This social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism lies at the root of the so-called crisis of care. Although inherent in capitalism as such, it assumes a different and distinctive guise in every historically specific form of capitalist society—in the liberal, competitive capitalism of the 19ᵗʰ century; in the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era; and in the financialized neoliberal capitalism of our time. The care deficits we experience today are the form this contradiction takes in this third, most recent phase of capitalist development.” [Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review. Series II, number 100, July–August 2016. Pages 99-117.]

“Not so long ago, in the heyday of social democracy, disputes about justice presumed what I shall call a ‘Keynesian-Westphalian frame.’ …

“The phrase ‘Keynesian-Westphalian frame’ is meant to signal the national-territorial underpinnings of justice disputes in the heyday of the postwar democratic welfare state, roughly 1945 to the 1970s. The term ‘Westphalian’ refers to the Treaty of 1648, which established some key features of the modern international state system. However, I am concerned neither with the actual achievements of the Treaty nor with the centuries-long process by which the system it inaugurated evolved. Rather, I invoke ‘Westphalia’ as a political imaginary that mapped the world as a system of mutually recognizing sovereign territorial states.…

“… beyond those of the ‘what’ and the ‘who,’ which I shall call the question of the ‘how.’ That question, in turn, inaugurates a paradigm shift: what the Keynesian-Westphalian frame cast as the theory of social justice must now become a theory of post-Westphalian democratic justice.…

“… Increasingly subject to contestation, the Keynesian-Westphalian frame is now considered by many to be a major vehicle of injustice, as it partitions political space in ways that block many who are poor and despised from challenging the forces that oppress them.”

[Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World.” New Left Review. Series II, number 36, November–December 2005. Pages 69-88.]

“Once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of a world without antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how it is possible under those conditions to create or maintain a pluralistic democratic order. Such an order is based on a distinction between ‘enemy’ and ‘adversary.’ It requires that, within the context of the political community, the opponent should be considered not as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an adversary whose existence is legitimate and must be tolerated. We will fight against his ideas but we will not question his right to defend them. The category of the ‘enemy’ does not disappear but is displaced; it remains pertinent with respect to those who do not accept the democratic ‘rules of the game’ and who thereby exclude themselves from the political community.

“Liberal democracy requires consensus on the rules of the game, but it also calls for the constitution of collective identities around clearly differentiated positions and the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. This ‘agonistic pluralism’ is constitutive of modern democracy and, rather than seeing it as a threat, we should realize that it represents the very condition of existence of such democracy.”

[Chantal Mouffe. The Return of the Political. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1993. Page 4.]

“We believe the use of SNA [social network analysis] in higher education should become more systemic and holistic as its implementation in our field of study brings about many potential benefits.… However, if SNA is going to contribute to our field, it should also be conducted more carefully and from a critical perspective. Failing to do so will only exacerbate existing inequities by continuously blaming the oppressed for ‘lacking what it takes’ to succeed in college. In this spirit, we add a fourth benefit: sustaining a critical, multidisciplinary, and multimethod examination of inequities in higher education. We call this approach critical SNA (CSNA).…

“Instead of focusing on a deficit perspective, using CSNA we found that male African American and male Latino students are benefiting from interacting with similar peers (i.e., peers from the same racial/ethnic group) in terms of the credits they complete and, most likely, in terms of the networks they form.”

[Manuel S. González Canché and Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, “Critical Social Network Analysis in Community Colleges: Peer Effects and Credit Attainment.” New Directions for Institutional Research. Number 163, March 2015. Pages 75-91.]

“… [Manuel S.] González Canché and [Cecilia] Rios-Aguilar inform us of ways to close this gap [in ‘the disparate impacts of increasing tuitions and debt loads for students of color and low-income students’] by using critical social network analysis (CSNA). They not only present a concrete example of how to use social network analysis in higher education but also demonstrate how it can be used in a critical manner to explore and reveal inequities, leading to recommendations for change in policies and structures.” [Ryan S. Wells and Frances K. Stage, “Past, Present, and Future of Critical Quantitative Research in Higher Education.” New Directions for Institutional Research. Number 163, March 2015. Pages 103-112.]

“… networks have mathematical properties that, in some applications, have a sociological meaning and significance. They generate both constraints and opportunities for those involved in them, simultaneously exposing them to and insulating them from various influences. These properties may manifest at the level of the whole network, at the level of individual nodes, which have different positions within it, or at the level of identifiable clusters in the network. Networks can be ‘wired’ in different ways and their members, both individually and in clusters, can enjoy different positions within them. These variations often have considerable relational-sociological significance and SNA allows us to explore this.” [Nick Crossley, “Interactions, Juxtapositions, and Tastes: Conceptualizing ‘Relations’ in Relational Sociology.” Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Pages 123-143.]

“… the emergent paradigm helps clarify a series of confusions that have long plagued clarity of understanding in social science. Failing to distinguish spontaneous orders from organizations has been a source of confusion, because the same word has consistently been used to describe two fundamentally different kinds of order. [Friedrich August von] Hayek emphasized the confusion arising over the term ‘economy,’ which refers to both the spontaneous order of a market economy and the economy of a corporation or a household. Science suffers the same ambiguity. Science is a spontaneous order and a scientist ‘does science’ by pursuing a research project. Democracy is a spontaneous order when there is no overarching purpose pursued by the polity, but a democracy in a major war possesses a national unity of priorities and acts like an organization. Significantly, it is when a democracy is most unified under a single hierarchy of goals (most ‘democratic’ from an organizational perspective) that it acts most undemocratically. The significance of this difference is often overlooked. This confusion runs throughout our language.

“Social emergence takes three broad forms: spontaneous order, where all share equal status and the system generates a single or very narrow set of signals for systemic coordination; civil society, where status is equal and a great many and sometimes conflicting kinds of feedback provide a rich matrix of information allowing for a wide range of choice and creative response; and other social emergent systems, such as the evolution of customs, in which there need not be equal status among participants, but there is no single goal of the system of relationships thereby established.”

[Gus Dizerega, “Outlining a New Paradigm.” Cosmos+Taxis. Volume 1, issue 1, 2013. Pages 3-20.]

“Ultimately, the challenge of morally transgressive art is to evaluate it in ethical and not exclusively aesthetic terms. This book represents the acceptance of that challenge. It has been necessary, obviously, to limit the amount of works selected in the effort to meet this challenge in the most critically effective way, while at the same time reinforcing the central argument. To that end, I have adopted a selection strategy that is not meant to suggest that the works of the (predominantly) British artists that have been subjected to ethical analysis for this project are the very best examples of morally transgressive art. Neither is this selection strategy entirely arbitrary. The work of the young British artists associated with the 1990s and the private patronage of visual art in a post-Thatcherite UK that had been changed irrevocably by her decadelong administration represents a kind of cluster phenomenon where diverse artists began to produce work that was extremely interesting and exciting, and infuriating and problematic, precisely because it engages moral sensibility in the manner described above.” [Kieran Cashell. Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. 2009. Page 14.]

“I would maintain that an adequate understanding of any country or area in the world today must be framed with reference to the global historical developments of the modern world, and that those forms of development can best be illuminated by a theory of capitalism.

“At the same time, I would argue that such a critical theory of capitalism must be rethought in ways that differ basically from what I call ‘traditional Marxism’ ….

“… [My] approach … provides the basis for a critical analysis of the structure of social labor and the nature of production in capitalism. It indicates that the industrial process of production should not be grasped as a technical process that, although increasingly socialized, is used by private capitalists for their own needs. Rather, the approach I am outlining grasps that process as intrinsically capitalist. Capital’s drive for ongoing increases in productivity gives rise to a productive apparatus of considerable technological sophistication that renders the production of material wealth essentially independent of direct human labor time expenditure. This, in turn, opens the possibility of large-scale socially-general reductions in labor time and fundamental changes in the nature and social organization of labor.”

[Moishe Postone, “The Critical Theory of Capitalism.” Presented at ¿Teoría Crítica del Capitalismo? SETC: Sociedad de Estudios de Teoría Crítica. November 23rd, 2012. Pages 1-11. Retrieved on November 30th, 2016.]

“This essay is an attempt to outline a reinterpretation of central aspects of [Karl] Marx’s analysis of the essence of capitalism and its historical development and, therefore, of his notion of socialism. His analysis of social labor and its implications for a consideration of needs and forms of consciousness which point to the possible overcoming of capitalism will be the focus of my examination. The intent is to provide a critique of the traditional Marxist point of view which, at the same time, lays the foundation for another critical historical analysis of the capitalist social formation.…

“There is …, according to Marx, no quasi-automatic transition from capitalism to a newer, more emancipatory form. This being the case, how is the overcoming of capitalism possible? Which conditions make possible that overcoming and how do they come into being? …

“It should be clear that the terms of this problem are radically changed by a redefinition of socialism as the material overcoming of alienated labor rather than only as the overcoming of private property and the market. This applies both to a consideration of social objectivity as well as to the content of social subjectivity. Too often in this century, the implicit determination of socialism in terms of distribution has led to considerations whose primary thrust was to explain why the revolution had not occurred, given that the ‘objective’ possibilities for the abolition of private property and the establishment of a planned economy had long been present. In spite of the broadening and deepening of Marxism which sometimes resulted from such attempts, concerned themselves with the subjective dimension of capitalist culture, they were limited by the underlying presupposition that the essence of the social formation is its mode of distribution. A center of concern, therefore, became the arrest of history—either through new capitalist institutions and tactics or because of historically arrested subjectivity.”

[Moishe Postone, “Necessity, Labor, and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism.” Social Research. Volume 45, number 4, winter 1978. Pages 739-788.]

“Dogmatomachy (ideological warfare) has infected contemporary liberal-democratic politics, and we need to understand it.…

“People naturally want to fix the problems they see, and I confess to wondering if any remedy might be found for the predicament in which we find ourselves. Because human beings are not machines, or inanimate objects, the mere understanding of a problem can often contribute to its solution. Surely it is in our power to recognize the absurdity of the logical postulates behind dogmatomachy—the postulates of abstraction, absolutization and total victory. Surely we can, if we will, abandon them. But for various reasons such a change of heart and mind is not likely to occur anytime soon. Like a marriage that has turned sour, political associations that devolve into war are hard to put right again.”

[David D. Corey, “Dogmatomachy: Ideological Warfare.” Cosmos+Taxis. Volume 1, issue 3, 2014. Pages 60-71.]

“The reflection theory is no invention of Marxism. It is one of the traditional approaches in epistemology and has had a long history. During the course of this history, many different versions of the theory have been put forward, embodying virtually all the different main philosophical outlooks: there have been empiricist and rationalist versions, idealist and materialist ones. The first essential point to see, however, is that the Marxist theory of reflection is a distinctive, dialectical materialist, version, which does not merely repeat previous accounts. Failure to appreciate this has been at the basis of almost all the criticisms and objections which are aimed at [Friedrich] Engels’ and [Vladimir] Lenin’s work.” [Sean Sayers, “Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 33, spring 1983. Pages 16-26.]

“Preparedness exercises do not create something new, they do not organize subjects with a view to radical change, but rehearse in a ritual play that which has already been set out as inevitable: the ‘next terrorist attack’ which will differ from previous ones only in the intensity and/or extensivity of destruction. Mythic time replaces the temporal indeterminacy of the unexpected future event. Exercises function in the modality of the future anterior, not as a wager made in the present for changing the future, but as the continuity of a pregiven future back into the present: the next terrorist attack will have been. The future anterior of preparedness allows exercises to function in a time of certainty, of tautology and of a ‘foregone conclusion’ in which the unexpected is always expected as it will already have been.” [Claudia Aradau, “The myth of preparedness.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 161, May/June 2010. Pages 2-7.]

“The field of human resource development (HRD) practice and research describes itself as emphasizing three major areas in workplace organizations that arguably overlap adult education’s focus on learning : training and development, career development, and organizational development …. Indeed, schools of education are where HRD programs boast the fastest growing enrollment …. However, adult education theorists have taken up an antagonistic position to the HRD field through a sustained attack from diverse critical perspectives. But what if these energies were diverted to support a space within HRD to nurture critical questions about power, interests, and equity and to articulate critical challenges of oppressive organizational structures and knowledge legitimation? A critical HRD stream would not presume to supplant existing conceptions of HRD in a totalizing fashion but would develop as one among the multiple paradigms coexisting in this pluralistic field. A critical HRD might even open a middle space in schools of education—a site where those committed to critical perspectives in adult learning, workers’ lives, organization studies, leadership, and human development could inform and support one another’s research and practice. In this middle space, critical adult educators might find fruitful alliances with their HRD colleagues toward just, equitable, life-giving, and sustainable work.” [Tara J. Fenwick, “Toward a Critical HRD in Theory and Practice.” Adult Education Quarterly. Volume 54, number 3, May 2004. Pages 193-209.]

“For revolutionaries the task is to create practices which attempt to make our own constituent power relations historically self-conscious and transparent. Such a project develops methods of collective work which avoid reproducing professional or scientific ‘expertise’ in the social form of competitive private property. If it doesn’t, then our allegedly revolutionary theory becomes just another academic discipline or a ‘correct line’ about the objective world ‘out there,’ divorced from any struggle against our own material relation to capital. Revolutionary theory cannot imitate the virtues of capital’s science but must inform our struggle against the power relations that make that science ‘true.’ [Les Levidow, “Towards a Materialist Theory of Ideology: The IQ Debale as a Case Study.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 22, summer 1979. Pages 15-29.]

“I think the difference between [Karl] Marx’s theory of ideology and the ideology of ideology is that whereas the latter thinks of it in terms of two elements and a relation between them (or one element, reality, and its property of creating another element, an idea) Marx’s theory is dialectical. It is a theory of a totality. Both the nature of the components and that of the relations between them are thus drastically different. It can be represented as below although it should be remembered that this is presented as merely a helpful graphical device and should not be taken too seriously especially in as much as it can give no account of the relations within the totality.” [John Mepham, “The Theory of Ideology in Capital.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 2, summer 1972. Pages 12-19.]

“John Mepham’s paper ‘The Theory of Ideology in Capital’ is an important contribution to the debate over [Karl] Marx’s theory of ideology. It would not be too much to say that it raises that debate to a new level, at which the real difficulties of the subject can be seen. It achieves this largely through the manner in which so many persuasive errors and half-truths are identified and rejected. The views Mepham castigates are commonplace in the literature, and the treatment of them is a substantial, if negative, achievement. In the light of it the inadequacy of his positive thesis has almost a tragic quality.” [Joe McCarney, “The Theory of Ideology: Some Comments on Mepham.” Review article. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 13, spring 1976. Pages 28-31.]

“The analysis of ideologies and forms of knowledge and belief is in a state of disorder. In contemporary Marxism, the autonomy and independent importance of ideology have been stressed at the expense of a discredited economic reductionism. In many ways this is a desirable development, although, as we have pointed out elsewhere, it also carries with it some very misleading consequences. However, the critical problem that contemporary Marxist theories of ideology have to face is: how is one to reconcile materialism with the autonomy of ideology? This implies a second difficulty: namely, how is one to reconcile the notion of ideology as critique with a general theory of ideology? In terms of disciplinary definitions, there is a parallel question about the relationship of the Marxist theory of ideology to the sociology of knowledge which developed in opposition to classical Marxism.” [Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, “Determinacy and Indeterminacy in the Theory of Ideology.” New Left Review. Series I, number 142, November–December 1983. Pages 55-66.]

“The story of critical neuroscience began on a bus in the outskirts of Berlin, where the editors first met. The spirit of excitement of the first discussion would soon be followed with frustration—not simply in response to the growing neuromania in the natural and human sciences, but also about the seemingly intractable differences between our disciplines and the difficulties in articulating how, and to what ends, to be “critical.”

“These tensions gave rise to the growth of an energetic group of young scholars with backgrounds in neuroscience, philosophy, history of science, anthropology, sociology, and psychology …. What eventually followed, after months of wrestling with diverse concepts, vocabularies, and standpoints, was a consensus that what is needed is an understanding of how these neurophenomena are worked out, circulated, and applied; and to figure out how analyzing the social and cultural context of the neurosciences might help to push experimental work in alternative directions….

“… The outcome of the debates has, however, been fruitful in numerous ways, for example in leading us to call for a ‘reality check’ on the neurosciences. In what ways are we witnessing insights that are entirely novel, potentials that are revolutionary, applications that are empowering or threatening to human beings?”

[Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby in Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience. Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing imprint of Wiley-Blackwell. 2012. Google Play edition.]

“In this essay I shall examine a critical architecture, one resistant to the self-confirming, conciliatory operations of a dominant culture and yet irreducible to a purely formal structure disengaged from the contingencies of place and time. A reinterpretation of a few projects by Mies van der Rohe will provide examples of a critical architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient representation of preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached autonomy of an abstract formal system. The proposition of a critical realm between culture and form is not so much an extension of received views of interpretation as it is a challenge to those views that claim to exhaust architectural meaning in considerations of only one side or the other. It will be helpful, therefore, to begin with a brief review of two prevalent interpretive perspectives that make just such a claim.” [K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form.” Perspecta. Volume 21, 1984. Pages 14-29.]

“This paper frames postapocalypse not as a literature of pessimism or warning but as a radical context to explore dangerous possibilities without rehearsing apocalypse’s characteristic damnation, salvation and enforcement of a horizon of revelation that simultaneously works to obliterate aberrant possibilities. In order to explore these claims, the process of thinking beyond revelation in apocalypse is defined here as ‘the postapocalyptic imagination.’ …

“Postapocalypse focuses on decay, disaster and ruin. It emphasizes the possibilities that emerge within these settings over the desire for deliverance from them. Its expressions are found in postapocalyptic literary texts, but also in theory that looks beyond revelation and lays its stakes beyond the end of capitalism, not in the sense of finding an alternative to it so much as imagining what passing its horizons might look and feel like. As such, postapocalypse is distinct from utopian and dystopian literature, as well as being beyond critiques which charge the imagination with responding to the present with a viable and desirable vision of replacement.“

“… Postapocalypse is a space for offering up imagined tactics without awarding salvationist judgements. It recognizes that world-ending catastrophes are multiple, interpretive, and uncontained within narrative structures and temporalities.”

[Briohny Doyle, “The postapocalyptic imagination.” Thesis Eleven. Volume 131, number 1, November 2015. Pages 99-113.]

“Two key concepts in health promotion within the nurse-client relationship are power and empowerment. Theorists and researchers have not achieved consensus on how they are to be defined and addressed. However, both power and empowerment are recognized to occur at macro and micro levels, and as such need to be addressed at each level. Using a critical nursing perspective, this article explores these concepts–it identifies concerns that arise around power and risks that arise in empowerment practice. Nurses are challenged to develop a new way of seeing empowerment practice, and encouraged to focus on ‘being with’ clients, rather than ‘doing to’ them.

“This manuscript will apply a critical theoretical perspective, and specifically a critical nursing perspective. This is informed by critical social theory, which holds to the following tenets: there is a possibility for a future free of domination, exploitation, and oppression; domination is structural; structures of domination are reproduced through a false-consciousness; social change begins at home; and people are responsible not to perpetuate domination themselves …. Within the critical perspective, taken-for-granted assumptions are challenged, as they may be oppressive to individuals and groups …. Additionally, it is recognized that we must move beyond the generation of knowledge to the creation and facilitation of change. This change should include the elimination of oppressive structures, and may be addressed by individuals empowering themselves and through the generation of knowledge. These critical theory goals coincide with many of the goals of empowerment practice that have been postulated.

[Abram Oudshoorn, “Power and empowerment: critical concepts in the nurse-client relationship.” Contemporary Nurse. Volume 20, number 1, 2005. Page 57.]

“In plain English, we need some concept of consciousness or the psyche as the seat or the origination of that rationality. Hegemony as a concrete form of social analysis must become a form of Marxist psychology that explains the pernicious success of the market penetration of the psyche itself. And this raises the vexed question, once more, of the mode and manner of ‘the reproduction of social practices’. By what mode and manner does the particularistic ‘logic of capital’ become perceived or experienced as ‘universal rationality’ (commodity fetishism) itself? The question is unanswerable without some model of human agency and its malleability.” [Ronald Mather, “Hegemony and Marxist Psychology.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 13, number 4. Pages 469-487.]

“In this article we concentrate on the ways in which some American Marxists treat three basic issues in psychology; 1) Unconscious mental activity; 2) Emotion and thinking; 3) Reflection theory. In essence we try to show that the approach of these Marxists to psychology has been, in the main, insufficiently rooted in empirical data; that it onesidedly stresses the conscious, idea- tional, rational side of man and ignores unconscious psychological factors. If consciousness and unconscious mental activity are two aspects of a basic dialectical unity, a position held by many Marxists with which we agree, then in order to understand either aspect of the contradiction it is necessary to understand the other aspect; that is, in order to understand consciousness properly, it is essential to understand unconsciousness.” [S. Cohen, R. Johnson, and R. West, “Marxist Psychology in America: A Critique.” Science & Society. Volume 21, number 2, spring 1957. Pages 98-121.]

“… Marxist-Freudians remain at the periphery of American and English criticism of social psychology. This peripheral place, despite the accomplishments of the Marxist-Freudians, is, in part, justified (though they have probably been ignored by liberal social psychologists for different reasons). A critical social psychology should include a description and analysis of precisely that intermediate level of social processes which the Marxist-Freudians omit: how are the reproduction and transformation of social relations and the individual life processes which constitute them accomplished in social interaction? A critical social psychology is an attempt to include that mediating process.” [Philip Wexler, “Alternative viewpoints: foundations of a critical social psychology.” Counterpoints. Volume 16, 1996. Pages 55-76.]

“What is developing today is a third, more inclusive, image of man, which is now already in the process of generating great changes in all intellectual fields and in all social and human institutions ….

“Third Force psychology, as some are calling it, is in large part a reaction to the gross inadequacies of behavioristic and Freudian psychologies in their treatment of the higher nature of man. Classical academic psychology has no systematic place for higher-order elements of the personality such as altruism and dignity, or the search for truth and beauty. You simply do not ask questions about ultimate human values if you are working in an animal lab.”

[Abraham Maslow, “Some Educational Implications of the Humanistic Psychologies.” Harvard Educational Review. Volume 38, number 4, fall 1968. Pages 685-696.]

“I should say … that I consider Humanistic, Third Force Psychology to be transitional, a preparation for a still ‘higher’ Fourth Psychology, transpersonal, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interest, going beyond humanness, identity, self-actualization, and the like. There will soon (1968) be a Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, organized by the same Tony Sutich who founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. These new developments may very well offer a tangible, usable, effective satisfaction of the ‘frustrated idealism’ of many quietly desperate people, especially young people. These psychologies give promise of developing into the life-philosophy, the religion-surrogate, the value-system, the life-program that these people have been missing. Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic. We need something ‘bigger than we are’ to be awed by and to commit ourselves to in a new, naturalistic, empirical, non-churchly sense, perhaps as [Henry David] Thoreau and [Walt] Whitman, William James and John Dewey did.” [Abraham Maslow. Toward a Psychology of Being. Second edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc. 1968. Pages iii-iv.]

“I would expect … [a] paradox to be found in transcenders: namely, that they are more apt to regard themselves as carriers of talent, instruments of the transpersonal, temporary custodians so to speak of a greater intelligence or skill or leadership or efficiency. This means a certain peculiar kind of objectivity or detachment toward themselves that to nontranscenders might sound like arrogance, grandiosity, or even paranoia. The example I find most useful here is the attitude of the pregnant mother toward herself and her unborn child. What is self? What is not? How demanding, self-admiring, arrogant does she have a right to be?” [Abraham H. Maslow. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: A Viking Compass Edition imprint of The Viking Press, Inc. 1972. Page 291.]

“[Abraham H.] Maslow did not mean to found ‘a psychology without people,’ but he did mean to help create a psychology based on the notion that people can transcend even their human needs for personal self-actualization and seek after "cosmic" values like the good, the true, and the beautiful. Maslow taught that in peak moments, people may be able to transcend personal identity while remaining essentially human.” [Mark E. Koltko-Rivera, “Maslow’s ‘Transhumanism’: Was Transpersonal Psychology Conceived as ‘A Psychology without People in it’?” The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 38, number 1, winter 1998. Pages 71-80.]

“There have been, and continue to be, many psychological and philosphical traditions around the globe that are truly transpersonal in their orientation. These approaches are often grounded in the context of elegant and greatly detailed systems of thought, some with a rich history that literally spans thousands of years, that, as a whole, touch almost every culture on earth (in fact, transpersonal anthropology is also a young and growing field). These approaches include Vedanta, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Yoga and the Indian philosophies, Sufism, Christian mysticism, Taoism, Kabbalistic thought and mystic Judaism, the spiritual world-views of American Indian cultures, and the teachings of [George] Gurdjieff and his followers.” [Ronald S. Valle and Carmi Harari, “Current Developments in…Transpersonal Psychology. The Humanistic Psychologist. Volume 33, number 1, winter 1985. Pages 11-15.]

“… transpersonal psychology does not have all of the answers. For this reason, it cannot work in isolation. Its lens of inclusiveness effectively welcomes the complementary strengths of humanistic and integral psychologies, as well as other similarly oriented disciplines, to the shared task of reshaping psychology and reconstructing the vision of what it is to be human.” [Glenn Hartelius, Mariana Caplan, and Mary Anne Rardin, “Transpersonal Psychology: Defining the Past, Divining the Future.” The Humanistic Psychologist. Volume 35, number 2, 2007. Pages 135-160.]

“The reductionism produced by a narrow empiricism affected not only psychology. It has created a morass of confusion for all of the human enterprise of the twentieth century, from which we are just beginning to emerge. By ‘narrow empiricism,’ I mean the view that the only valid information that could be scientifically studied was that information externally observable by the senses. Of course, this left out of discourse all inherently subjective experience of the human psyche. Transpersonal psychology intentionally included this internal domain of experience in its field of inquiry.” [Dwight Judy, “Transpersonal Psychology: Mapping Spiritual Experience.” Religions. Volume 2, number 4, November 2011. Open access. Pages 649-658.]

“Transpersonal Psychology has features of a faith-based belief system. However, to the extent that it is a faith-based belief system, it is one that has acquired professional and academic stature. In the San Francisco Bay area, transpersonal psychology is taught as an academic discipline at John F. Kennedy University in its Holistic Studies Program (http://www.jfku.edu). This school includes curricula that emphasize the more qualitative aspects of psychology, including parapsychology. It is feasible for a student to get a graduate degree Holistic Studies at this school at this school and be eligible to sit for clinical licensure in Califomia.” [Patrick O’Reilly, “Transpersonal Psychology.” The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. Volume 10, January 2006. Pages 16-20.]

“Transpersonal psychology has concentrated on the inner development of the individual, as evidenced by its focus on meditation, spiritual aspects of psychosis, the phenomenology of higher states of consciousness, and the conjoining of these states with new paradigms in physics. Yet, for earlier generations of sociologists and anthropologists these same higher states were also understood as social and broadly shareable in a group context. Their inherent social function was seen as central to group cohesion and collective identity.” [Harry T. Hunt, “Consciousness and Society: Societal Aspects and Implications of Transpersonal Psychology.” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies. Volume 29, number 1, 2010. Pages 20-30.]

“The purpose here is to translate the Fifth Force Psychologies movement through an integral (Wilberian) lens.…

“… For my focus of research, I’ll analyze another movement, the Fifth Force Psychology (really psychologies as there are many types) in this paper, from the perspective of integral philosophy and theory (a la Ken Wilber). This Wilberian integral approach is based (in part) on what various theorists have labeled ‘integral-aperspectival worldview’ (a la Jean Gebser)—a next step or level in the evolution of consciousness (thinking and values) beyond pluralism, humanism, and existentialism.…

“… The First Force was Psychoanalysis, the Second was Behaviorism (with its Cognitivist spin-offs later on), and the third was Humanistic (with its Existentialist spin-offs). The Fourth was Transpersonal, and this was the category which Ken Wilber was situated. He was one of the ‘fathers’ of this Transpersonal Movement of scholarship and practices.”

[R. Michael Fisher, “The Death of Psychology: Integral & Fifth Force Psychologies.” Technical Paper number 36. In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute. Carbondale, Illinois. 2010. Pages 1-31.]

“… we find that a main mechanism that endows individuals with power is found in the local domains of participation, i.e., the organizational units of which they are members, and that the capacity of such a unit to empower its members depends on its integration in organization-wide communication networks. The basis of this integration is conceived as overlapping circles of weak ties that inhibit segmentation along occupational or organizational lines and sustain wide participation by rewarding those who participate.…

“… patterns of working relations develop across the bureaucratic structure. This is clearly observable when we see a baseball game being coached by a recreation aide and psychiatrist. These relations are strengthened and legitimized through mechanisms of peer review that formally involve all programs and departments and through the decentralization of administrative work (planning, evaluation, program development), much of which is carried out in interdisciplinary committees. There are no fewer than fifty-one committees, with each staff member serving on an average of four of them.”

[Judith R. Blau and Richard D. Alba, “Empowering Nets of Participation.” Administrative Science Quarterly. Volume 27, number 3, September 1982. Pages 363-379.]

“The resurgence of a social justice counseling perspective … is the the [counseling] profession’s attempt to return to its roots as a fifth force in the field. Based on this perspective, social justice counseling follows the psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, existential-humanistic, and multicultural counseling forces that exist in the profession. Other scholars have also followed suit indicating that social justice counseling is a reemerging force that is shaping how human behavior is explained and the ways in which counseling is currently being practiced ….

“… classifying social justice as a fifth force is not suggesting that it is a new concept. Rather, it has more to do with acknowledging how the social justice perspective has matured since its infancy in the early 1900s. Moreover, it is about recognizing the depth, breadth, and widespread impact the social justice perspective is currently having on the counseling profession. Whether or not social justice counseling should be considered a fifth force is up for debate. What is perhaps not debatable is the growing impact of social justice, advocacy, and activism in the field.”

[Manivong Ratts, “Social Justice Counseling: Toward the Development of a Fifth Force Among Counseling Paradigms.” Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development. Volume 48, issue 2, fall 2009. Pages 160-172.]

“There is a seamless connection between multiculturalism and social justice counseling. Both the multicultural and social justice counseling perspectives acknowledge the importance of diversity and recognize that oppression has a debilitating effect on mental health. Together, both perspectives promote the need to develop multiculturally and advocacy competent helping professionals. The imprint of multiculturalism and social justice on the counseling field has also revolutionized the profession. To illustrate, the multicultural counseling perspective shifted the helping paradigm from one that ignored the sociopolitical context to one that recognizes the importance of cultural variables in the counseling relationship …. Similarly, the social justice counseling perspective has brought attention to the importance of using advocacy as a mechanism to address systemic barriers that hinder clients’ ability to achieve optimal psychological health and well-being … [Manivong J. Ratts, “Multiculturalism and Social Justice: Two Sides of the Same Coin.” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. Volume 39, number 1, January 2011. Pages 24-37.]

“The current trend toward increased multicultural counseling among counselors is critical and has been argued to be a fourth force in the helping professions with as profound an impact on counseling as the third force of humanism had on the prevailing psychodynamic (first force) and behavioral systems (second force) of that time …. Each force reflects a new movement in counseling and psychology. The multicultural dimension is not competing with other counseling theories. By making culture central to humanism, psychodynamism, and behavioral psychology, those perspectives are strengthened, not weakened.

“Similar arguments have also been made to consider social justice as a fifth force in counseling …. Social justice is a paradigm unto itself distinct from all other helping models. Social justice counseling acknowledges that human development issues need to be understood within the context of living in an oppressive environment. Counseling is not office bound. The debilitating impact of oppression warrants the need for advocacy and activism in communities. Social justice counselors understand that counseling involves both individual and systems work.”

[Manivong J. Ratts and Paul B. Pedersen. Counseling for Multiculturalism and Social Justice: Integration, Theory, and Application. Fourth edition. Alexandria, Virginia: American Counseling Association. 2014. Pages X.]

“” [Manivong J. Ratts and Paul B. Pedersen. Counseling for Multiculturalism and Social Justice: Integration, Theory, and Application. Fourth edition. Alexandria, Virginia: American Counseling Association. 2014. Pages X.]

“At the public policy level, multicultural and social justice counselors focus on the rules, laws and policies that impact clients and other members of their group. This work may involve altering oppressive laws and policies or helping to create more-inclusive policies. An example could include focusing on issues faced by a female transgender client who is forced by city or state laws to either use the public restroom of the gender recorded on their birth certificate or face legal consequences. The counselor might advocate with, or on behalf of, the client by using the counselor’s cisgender (person who is not transgender) privilege to work with city officials to alter policies and practices that are oppressive toward transgender people. Furthermore, counselors, along with their local counseling organizations and legislators, may help to create policies and laws that do not discriminate against the transgender population and other sexual and gender minorities who constantly feel the brunt of stigmatization.” [Manivong J. Ratts, Anneliese A. Singh, S. Kent Butler, Sylvia Nassar-McMillan, and Julian Rafferty McCullough, “Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies: Practical applications in counseling.” Counseling Today: A Publication of the American Counseling Association. January 27th, 2016. Website. Retrieved on October 29th, 2016.]

“This article provides a pragmatic approach to how microlevel social justice advocacy strategies can be implemented into counseling practices. It provides an overview of oppression dynamics and its connection to mental health issues as a framework for understanding the importance of social justice advocacy in counseling. It considers social justice related concepts, assumptions, its application at the microlevel, as well as implications for the profession.…

“… A social justice advocacy approach to counseling examines how issues of equity impact the fair distribution of resources such as education, healthcare, and employment. To this end, interventions are focused on ensuring that oppressive environmental barriers are not negatively impeding client well-being and mental health.”

[Manivong Ratts, “A Pragmatic View of Social Justice Advocacy: Infusing Microlevel Social Justice Advocacy Strategies into Counseling Practices.” Counseling and Human Development. Volume 41, number 1, September 2008. Pages 1-8.]

“There is a sense of urgency for counselor educators to incorporate a social justice counseling perspective into their programs. The problems clients bring to therapy are real and often rooted in social, political, and economic conditions …. The training of students in counselor education programs needs to reflect this reality if the profession is to arm emerging counselors with the skills they need to be successful. Preparing emerging counselors for the realities of the profession can be achieved through a social justice framework …. Social justice counseling acknowledges the interplay between clients and their environment …. Moreover, social justice counseling builds off feminist and multicultural therapy tenets of empowering and liberating clients from oppression by using advocacy as a means to address individual, social/cultural, and institutional forms of oppression ….” [Manivong J. Ratts and Chris Wood, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Diffusion of Innovation as a Mechanism to Integrate Social Justice in Counselor Education.” Counselor Education and Supervision. Volume 50, issue 3, March 2011. Pages 207-223.]

“Humanistic psychology’s silence on economic justice issues does not support its historical vision for self-actualization and human flourishing. The eudaimonic goal to see humankind optimize its potential requires that economic justice be realized. The purpose of this article is to bring classism to the forefront of humanistic psychology priorities again, together with other social justice concerns outlined in this seminal issue. We will begin with (a) a brief exploration of the impact of economic injustice on human well-being; (b) followed by an explanation of classism’s etiology within the economic structures of Capitalism; (c) finally, we will review implications for humanistic psychologists and counselors, offering suggestions for counseling practice, advocacy, and scholarship.” [Arie T. Greenleaf, Manivong J. Ratts, and and Samuel Y. Song, “Rediscovering Classism: The Humanist Vision for Economic Justice.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 56, number 6, November 2016. Pages 646-664.]

“… scholars have declared social justice action as a moral imperative of the [counseling] profession …. In the counseling psychology discipline, … a call [has been issued] for the profession to move forward in a more committed way to embrace social justice as a central tenet of our discipline. Counseling psychology has a longstanding identity as being strength-based and a history of providing vocational services for at-risk populations …. Counseling psychology has a longstanding identity as being strength-based and a history of providing vocational services for at-risk populations …. Currently, social justice is being heralded as the ‘fifth force’ in counseling psychology ….” [Stephanie Marie Hoover. Mental health counselor trainees’ social justice identity development due to social justice-oriented practicum training: possibilities for change in self and the world. Ph.D. dissertation. The University of Utah. Salt Lake City, Utah. August, 2013. Page 2.]

“Queer theory is a postmodern critical theory that grew out of the women’s, gay, and queer studies’ movements of the 1990s. As a critical theory, queer theory explores the disconnect between biological sex, gender, desire, identity, and culture, and how discrepancies between each can speak to the multiple forms of reality present within the world, and instability of binary positions.… A pronounced focus of the article will center on the social justice implications of queer humanistic work, and the utility of the theory to promote self-exploration, holistic integration, and validation of all clients’ human potential.…

“Queer theory is rooted in poststructuralism/postmodernism, and applies this paradigm to the constructs of sexualities, genders, and identities …. The goal of queer theory is to deconstruct binary societal understandings of sex, gender, and identity (and one would suspect the world itself) to expose the imbalance of power present in the world and how that is expressed through the language, labels, and identities we provide to these constructs ….

“… The shared roots in postmodernism allows queer theory to be integrated and utilized in ways that remain philosophically consistent with the intentionality of humanism in psychology and counselor education: promoting self-exploration, holistic integration, and validation of all clients’ human potential.”

[Kristopher M. Goodrich, Melissa Luke, and and Aaron J. Smith, “Queer Humanism: Toward an Epistemology of Socially Just, Culturally Responsive Change.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 56, number 6, November 2016. Pages 612-623.]

“Critical psychology (better: critical psychologies) has emerged using multifaceted approaches in theory and practice outside of the mainstream of psychology in many countries around the globe. Although critical-psychological ideas can befound prior to the 1960s, the most important developments were made since that period on the background of the rise of social epistemologies and social movements. A core goal of critical psychologists was to transform psychology into an emancipatory, radical, social-justice seeking, or status-quo-resisting approach that understands psychological issues as taking place in specific political-economic or cultural-historical contexts. The term critical psychology was originally claimed for a German school of thought, but was soon self-applied by psychologists from the English-speaking world and from other linguistic regions who gave the term their own meanings. Critical psychology has an even longer history if one considers critiques of mainstream psychology as belonging to critical psychology ….” [Thomas Teo. Critical Psychology. New York: SpringerReference imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. May 22nd, 2012. Pages 1-12.]

“Critical psychologists differ in the particular theories of society they choose. For example, the concept of a capitalist society involves notions of social structure, economic power, inequality, and so on. Feminist psychologists may prefer the term patriarchy as a description and analytical tool for society. What unites all critical psychologists is an understanding of society based on intersectionalized societal power differentials with consequences for human subjectivity in the conduct of one’s life. Recent research on income inequality and its consequences for mental health supports empirically such an argument ….” [Thomas Teo, “Critical Psychology: A Geography of Intellectual Engagement and Resistance.” American Psychologist. Volume 70, number 3, April 2015. Pages 243-254.]

“The approaches placed here universally support the empowerment and liberation of the above-mentioned identity groups. Yet, they do so more from an ideological than a circumscribed identity position. All anti-capitalist ideologies fall into this category. While Marxism is the most prominent, others of note, although little discussed in the US, are Marxist-feminist critique, postcolonial critique, and liberation psychology. In broad strokes, the anti-capitalist ideological critique of psychology that has arisen in the US and Europe is centered on how psychology supports the status quo by socializing its citizens to a capitalist ideology.” [Lois Holzman, “Critical Psychology, Philosophy, and Social Therapy.” Human Studies. Volume 36, number 4, December 2013. Pages 471-489.]

“I continued to stay connected with Occupy at the grassroots level, attending occasional general assemblies and smaller strategy meetings, but also launched a Facebook group called ‘OccuPsy: Critical Psychology for Decolonization,’ with hopes of mobilizing my colleagues to contribute to the success of the movement. The reference to ‘critical psychology’ was to help people around the world find the group, given the work of critical psychologists over several decades to link psychological inquiry more directly to social transformation ….” [Tod Sloan, “OccuPsy: Critical psychology for decolonization.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. Volume 18, number 4, December 2013. Pages 423-430.]

“The internal complexity of psychology as an academic discipline and professional practice demands a level of detailed and sustained critique that is able to address different ‘sub-disciplines’ and that is able to acknowledge that critical psychology itself is divided and contested. There is no one agreed ‘critical psychology,’ but rather a field of debate from which we can develop a number of arguments that are useful in different kinds of alternative research, including working with social movements. This handbook values diversity, and is designed to give a comprehensive overview of critical psychology while opening up the possibility of new versions of it. Critical psychology has developed from different standpoints (such as connections with anti-racist and feminist research, or with liberation psychology) as well in difficult cultural contexts (with specific histories of psychology in different regions of the world posing quite distinct questions for critical psychologists), and these are addressed in the following pages.” [Ian Parker, “Introduction: Principles and positions.” Handbook of Critical Psychology. Ian Parker, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Pages 1-9.]

“I am going to talk about a Latin American critical psychology. Why might that be relevant? I am struck by the parallels. A middle income country on the periphery of the capitalist centre. A neoliberal regime. A history of military dictatorship. Repression on an ‘industrial scale’ with torture, imprisonment and extrajudicial killings. Persecution and exclusion of minorities. Social trauma. And a mainstream psychology that serves the system. Where am I? Honduras? Guatemala? Argentina? Honduras? Colombia? Chile?…

“… There are parallel developments in several other places, some of which go under the name of liberation psychology and others which don’t.”

[Mark Burton, “Liberation psychology: A constructive critical praxis.” Estudos de Psicologia. Volume 30, number 2, April-June 2013. Pages 249-259.]

“The theory of liberation psychology is grounded in many tenets of liberation theology that have emerged from grassroots community struggles in other parts of the world where oppression reached an intolerable level. Providers of mental health and spiritual guidance in Latin American countries have been particularly vocal in bringing attention to the lamentation of the oppressed poor through the use of psychological liberation interventions in clinical practice as well as in theory development and critical pedagogy ….” [Eduardo Duran, Judith Firehammer, and John Gonzalez, “Liberation Psychology as the Path Toward Healing Cultural Soul Wounds.” Journal of Counseling & Development. Volume 86, number 3, summer 2008. Pages 288-295.]

“… it [this article] documents how a small grantmaking organization, coordinated by volunteer psychologists and human rights activists from the United States, deliberately targeted community-based programs designed to respond to the effects of gross violations of human rights, improving the psychosocial well-being of survivors while addressing the root causes of these violations. The Fund serves as an example of North–South pragmatic solidarity …, a praxis that supports a distinctive set of human rights and mental health practices while fostering a theory–practice dialectic toward a 21ˢᵗ-century liberation psychology praxis.” [M. Brinton Lykes and Erin Sibley, “Liberation Psychology and Pragmatic Solidarity: North–South Collaborations Through The Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. Volume 20, number 3, August 2014. Pages 209-226.]

“Liberation psychology is not new, nor is it a U.S. invention. It is a significant part of of psychology, particularly in Latin America …. Nonetheless, psychologists of color, feminist psychologists, and community psychologists in the U.S. have made a number of significant contributions.… An analysis of power is essential for addressing impediments to wellness, and, once again, liberation psychology and developmental psychology are synergistic. Because social power operates through formative institutions such as schools, enhancing the well-being of young people must engage that power.” [Roderick J. Watts and Constance Flanagan, “Pushing the Envelope on Youth Civic Engagement: A Developmental and Liberation Psychology Perspective.” Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 35, number 6, August 2007. Pages 779-792.]

“Examples illustrating how the liberation psychology is introduced in practice can be seen in papers concerning consciousness and human rights …; the dialectics of exclusion and inclusion … and community organization …; race relations and discrimination …; gender discrimination …; social movements …; community organization and development; and citizen empowerment ….” [Maritza Montero, “The Political Psychology of Liberation: From Politics to Ethics and Back.” Political Psychology. Volume 28, number 5, October 2007. Pages 517-533.]

“… [A] focus has been gaining momentum: liberation psychology. Its proponents seek to revolutionize psychology through an integration of psychology’s core mission—the psychological wellbeing of people—with the stark reality of nationally based oppressive systems that undermine this mission ….” [Kathryn E. Grant, Jo-Ann S. Finkelstein, and Aoife L. Lyons, “Integrating Psychological Research on Girls With Feminist Activism: A Model for Building a Liberation Psychology in the United States.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 31, numbers 1/2, March 2003. Pages 143-155.]

“… [An] important element of liberation psychology is the understanding of internalized oppression as an important element in maintaining oppression, and of the essential interlinkage between the social conditions of oppression and the psychological patterns associated with oppression. Psychological patterns such as sense of inferiority or helplessness that are associated with oppression clearly have their origins in social conditions of powerlessness and degradation. Such psychological patterns act as a barrier to action and are part of what maintains oppression. Thus liberation must involve transformation of the psychological patterns as well as the social conditions associated with oppression.” [Geraldine Moane, “Bridging the Personal and the Political: Practices for a Liberation Psychology.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 31, numbers 1/2, March 2003. Pages 91-101.]

“Liberation Psychology analyzes migratory phenomena in terms of power and calls for the transformation of societies at all levels (structural, organizational and individual) as a means to create social justice and conditions of well-being for all social groups …. In this transformation process, the role that organizations can play in the promotion of a just multicultural society is considered to be essential.…

“Oppression is a state of domination where the dominating group obtains privileges over others by restricting their access to resources and limiting their capacity to respond ….”

[Virginia Paloma and Vicente Manzano-Arrondo, “The Role of Organizations in Liberation Psychology: Applications to the Study of Migrations.” Psychosocial Intervention. Volume 20, number 3, 2011. Pages 309-318.]

“‘Liberation psychology’ is my attempt to systematize and synthesize a perspective that includes the best of humanistic, existential and transpersonal psychologies. The development of liberation psychology took shape through my dialogues with Native Americans of Northern California over a period of twenty-one years working as a psychotherapist and advocate for the rights of Native American children and their families. During this time the Indian Child Welfare Act and the law that guarantees Native American religious freedom were passed by Congress. A main concern was to make sure the psychological services looked at self-determination in light of these Native American laws and included necessary social activism because of the negative and often destructive influence of mainstream psychology in the lives of urban and tribal land-based Native Americans.” [Royal E. Alsup, “Liberation Psychology: A Visionary Mandate for Humanistic, Existential, and Transpersonal Psychologies.” Undated privately published online paper. No pagination. Retrieved on September 19th, 2016.]

“Liberation philosophy is postmodern in the sense that it challenges hegemonic metanarratives of ‘God’ and ‘the free market’ offered by ‘fetishized’ religion and faith in ‘global capitalism.’ Yet liberation philosophy is not postmodern if metanarratives of ‘revolution’ merely replace metanarratives of ‘oppression.’ Liberation philosophers deny that these are dichotomous, explaining that plurality can be affirmed without discarding empowering spirituality.” [Joanne M. Hall, “Marginalization Revisited: Critical, Postmodern, and Liberation Perspectives.” Advances in Nursing Science. Volume 22, number 2, December 1999. Pages 88-102.]

“The adoption of discourses from corporate capitalism into an essentially liberal institution like a university is not innocent. We have to be careful how we describe the process in which we are engaged for such descriptions are not neutral nor do they leave what they describe untouched. I offer one familiar example, pertinent to our current discussion. Students, especially given changes in funding policy, are now often redescribed as ‘customers.’ There are many reasons why we should resist this dangerous fatuity; the most fundamental being that it undermines the traditional relationship between faculty, the student and her institution.…

“… I believe that explicitness has politically positive possibilities in that its re-appropriation, as part of a general re-appropriation of the devalued currency of empowerment, can help in the construction of … what I, tongue in cheek, refer to as ‘liberation philosophy.’”

[Stephen Burwood, “Liberation philosophy.” Teaching In Higher Education. Volume 4, number 4, October 1999. Pages 447-460.]

“I have argued in this article for critical theory as a useful construct to view emerging forms of library advocacy and activism against the encroachment of techno–capitalist logics, with the open access movement as an example. Critical theory consciously links open access advocacy in libraries to other movements which challenge restrictions on access to information. Most importantly, critical theory opens up a discursive space for libraries in the democratization of technological discourses in society. Technology, rather than being part of a determinist discourse that will lead to the “demise” or “irrelevance” of libraries, in fact can be a realm for increased democratic participation of libraries. Critical theory creates a wider space for a progressive re–envisioning of the roles of libraries in promoting enhanced and more democratic forms of information access.” [Ajit Pyati, “A critical theory of open access: Libraries and electronic publishing.” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet. Volume 12, number 10, October 2007. Online publication. No pagination.]

“This paper … will … offer a dialectical definition of social harm based upon classical Marxist strains of ontological thought.…

“… Social harm will be dialectically viewed as socially constructed flows which disrupt and undermine the structures and processes of organic and inorganic being; in which humans, as natural beings, are entangled.…

“… the process of analysis is guided, at least within the Marxist tradition, by a dialectical ontology and a corresponding epistemology and method, which assist the scientist to abstract and prioritise essential relations and processes in a way that facilitates the comprehension of reality as a dynamic whole.”

[Kristian Lasslett, “Crime or social harm? A dialectical perspective.” Crime, Law and Social Change. Volume 54, number 1, August 2010. Pages 1-19.]

“Despite the neoliberal impetus behind the knowledge society, potential also exists for defining an Indian knowledge society in terms of enhanced public institutions and infrastructure, as well as a greater commitment to the public good. Thus, while the knowledge society of the Indian elite imagination is certainly molded from the basic dominant ideological framework that I have just described, openings do exist for more progressive visions of an Indian knowledge society. In other words, contradictory tendencies exist in the Indian knowledge society, with the potential for either capitalist intensification or genuine public sector and community-based alternatives. I term this contradictory nature of India’s current development discourse as the dialectic of the Indian knowledge society. By dialectics, I am referring to the Marxist conception of social change in which the social totality is taken as a given and oppositional tendencies within this totality are studied to gain insight into potentially more emancipating socialist futures …. In this framework, the contradictions of the Indian knowledge society can give insights into the possibilities for more progressive alternatives.” [Ajit Pyati, “Re-envisioning the ‘knowledge society’ in India: Resisting neoliberalism and the case for the ‘public.’” Ephemera: Theory & Knowledge in Organization. Volume 10, number 3/4, 2010. Pages 406-420.]

“Research syntheses in education, particularly meta-analyses and best-evidence syntheses, identify evidence-based practices by combining findings across studies whose constructs are similar enough to warrant comparison. Yet constructs come preloaded with social, historical, political, and cultural assumptions that anticipate how research problems are framed and solutions formulated. The information research syntheses provide is therefore incomplete when the assumptions underlying constructs are not critically understood. We describe and demonstrate a new systematic review method, critical construct synthesis (CCS), to unpack assumptions in research synthesis and to show how other framings of educational problems are made possible when the constructs excluded through methodological elimination decisions are taken into consideration.…

“… A CCS explores and critiques constructs included and excluded from research synthesis, particularly through the process of screening out studies that fail to meet methodological standards for providing best or quality evidence. It shows how reexamining research syntheses in light of constructs identified in methodologically excluded literature may open up possibilities for reframing educational problems.”

[Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, Tyler Hicks, and Vonzell Agosto, “Unpacking Assumptions in Research Synthesis: A Critical Construct Synthesis Approach.” Educational Researcher. Volume 46, number 3, 2017. Pages 131-139.]

“In this article I explore the concept of the racket, something most often associated with organized crime. More specifically, I draw parallels between the criminal rackets of organized crime groups, and the dynamics by which corporate interests come to prevail in political, organizational and social life. The paper attempts to close the conceptual distance between the patterns of hidden influence, networks and organizational mechanisms constituting criminal rackets, and those which characterize the operation of corporate power. This speaks to something of a normative objective; by comparing corporate behaviour to the conspiracies of organized crime, I highlight the real and potential social harms which are associated with racket like behaviour. To help achieve this I make use of the theory of rackets … outlined by members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. An additional dimension of this paper is then, the examination of their notion of a society of rackets … through scholarship in business, organization and society.” [Edward Granter, “Strictly business: Critical Theory and the society of rackets.” Competition & Change. Volume 21, number 2, 2017. Pages 94-113.]

“… the cultural differences among nations in the capitalist era are a product of the logic of capital—a logic that requires the creation and maintenance of national differences. Feudal Europe and Eastern Europe through the early twentieth century had very different ideologies than those characteristic of Western industrial capitalism. In the former areas, either because of the need to maintain Christian ideology and military support against peasant insurrections or because of the special economic needs of grain exporters, internationalism was generated and reinforced among the upper classes. In medieval times the Latin language and Roman Christianity were nearly universal, and there was little pressure to create distinctive national institutions. The generation of national languages and culture was a product of the rise of commercial classes interested in common and protected markets as well as in strong states to protect their economic interests.

“Classes are a product of the logic of the world capitalist system. In good part they operate independently of nation-states, involving themselves with nation-states only when it is to their interest to do so. Classes, not nations, must be considered the most fundamental active units of world systems. It is the logic of the relationship between the international capitalist class and the working class of the world system that is the primary motive force within the capitalist system. It is this logic that is the primary cause of social structures, political forms, and their transformations.

“The logic of classes generally explains the actions of nation-states. For example, certain types of societies engage in warfare much more frequently than others, e.g., slave societies, monopoly capitalist societies, and feudal societies. Such is the case because of the logic of their component classes. Slave societies, for example, need both a source of cheap labor (from war captives) and a source of new land (because of the inefficiency of slavery as a means of production).

“Class logic is, in the last analysis, the fundamental integrating force in any world system. For example, the world system of feudal Europe, although it did not have a common economy, had an integrated network of classes. The feudal aristocracy spoke the same language, had similar customs, related to peasants and to each other in similar ways, and fought wars in similar ways—all because of the common logic of the lord-serf relationship. Likewise, the socialist world system (the USSR and its allies today) or the many great empires of the past (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, with its state peasant mode of production, or the Ch’ing Empire in China with its peasant modes of production) have consisted of a common network of classes, whether or not there was a common market relatively autonomous from the rest of the world. There is an internal coherence to all of their important social institutions because of their common class logic. The same is true of the capitalist world system.”

[Albert Szymanski. The Logic of Imperialism. New York: Praeger Publishers imprint of CBS, Inc. 1981. Pages 15-16.]

“Karl Marx defined the lumpenproletariat as members of a class below that of the proletariat. This included vagabonds, homeless, criminals, disenfranchised military and similar portions of society. Generally deemed unfit to participate in the revolutionary efforts. A principle which was greatly adapted by the Soviet Union and even Maoist China.

“Typically the largest portion of this group were the peasants. Who suffered a great deal of agitation and repression from the Soviet and Maoist Vanguard.…

“Today, with the rise of the neoliberal establishment, however, classes have begun to develop internal hierarchies. The war on drugs, combined with housing segregation and ghettos after WW2 have partitioned classes into separate microsocieties. These societies in turn then develop their own regional bourgeoisie structures. The lumpenproletariat is no exception to this.

“So who are the lumpenbourgeoisie? … We must … define what bourgeoisie means. Most people mistake it to refer to the middle class. But in Marxist contexts it refers to people with enough amassed capital to override the policies demanded by democratic powers. It refers to the plutocrats of the world.

“As such, the lumpenbourgeoisie are the plutocrats of the underworld. They come in several shapes and forms, and have strong ties with the power structure purported by capitalist and sometimes even vanguardist states.…

“These [neo-Nazi] gangs ruled by violence, and would greatly influence the democratic process in the region. As such they may very well qualify as lumpenbourgeoisie.…

“… there are also historical examples of the lumpenbourgeoisie operating as an independent authority. That rivals the power of the surface bourgeoisie. One such example are the South American cartels. The Medellin Cartel in Columbia had a cocaine industry with an annual GDP [gross domestic product] measuring to about 2 billion US dollars.…

“So who created the European market for the underworld? It was a man by the name of Semion Mogilevich. Semion was born in the U(krainian)SSR, and established a criminal empire. However, unlike men before him in similar situations. He was going to change the structure of organised crime. Unlike the traditional Al Capone approach to running a mob, he simply saw organised crime as step 1.

“A way to get seeding money for legitimate investments.

“Thus creating a bridge between the lumpenbourgeoisie and the surface bourgeoisie. Starting his career with the Lyuberts Mafia group in Russia. At this point he committed smaller crimes and counterfeiting. As well as running a side business for funeral arrangements. In the 1980’s he moved on to work with the Solntsevskaya organisation and at this point he also ran a business of smuggling items for Jewish migrants. A few years later he moved to Hungary and bought a nightclub in Budapest.

“Which would serve as his headquarters. After this he began to purchase other establishments in places such as Prague and Moscow to establish an international network. This was important as we now see the transition between new and old organised crime. He started his own company called YBM Magnex and falsified documents in order to raise the value of stock prices by 2000%.…

“… [We see] the possibility and demonstrable presence of the lumpenbourgeoisie.…

“As the power dynamics change on a global scale. The uniformed peacekeepers who would commit dark deeds behind closed doors when the security cameras are turned off, are being assisted by the same groups they claim to protect us from. As the new proletariat, and it’s lumpen equivalents are faced with a new force of the ruling elite. If the lumpenbourgeoisie and surface bourgeoisie have allied themselves, we must ask ourselves if the lower and working classes will find the means to do the same.”

[Stuart Jan. Lumpenbourgeoisie: An analysis delving into the emerging fusion of plutocratic elements in the underworld, and surface capitalism. Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 2016. Pages 1-5.]

“In sum, since the end of the Cold War an oligarchic regime has been consolidated throughout the West, in both the socio-economic and the political sense. The first has been more widely noted, as wealth distribution has become more skewed and veritable monied oligarchies have emerged. In the United States in 2007, 1 per cent of the population owned 35 per cent of total wealth and the next 19 per cent owned 51 per cent, meaning that the top fifth of the population cornered 85 per cent of wealth, while the remaining four-fifths were left with a mere 15 per cent. However, we are also dealing with oligarchy in a formal political sense, because increasingly the elites are not subject to the same legal regime as the rest of the population.” [Marco d’Eramo, “Populism and the New Oligarchy.” Gregory Elliott, translator. New Left Review. Series II, number 82, July–August 2013. Pages 5-28.]

“A critical social psychology of racism and antiracism then will never be complete, just as it will never be wholly singular, or cohesive, at least not in the sense of being impervious to argumentation and debate. It is in this spirit of camaraderie, debate, innovation and collaboration that we wish to offer some reflections on future possible directions for a critical social psychology of racism and antiracism that we hope will never attain a definitive or singular status.” [Derek Hook and Caroline Howarth, “Future Directions for a Critical Social Psychology of Racism/Antiracism.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Volume 15, issue 6, November/December 2005. Pages 506-512.]

“One of the questions that the papers here as a whole invite is what is or what should be the point of a critical social psychology of racism? What questions should such an approach propose? What this special issue contributes to the study of racism is a focus on disruption, resistance and transformative practices. While social psychology has often preferred approaches that account for the expression of racism (whether this is located in individual minds, social institutions or cultural practices) and/or the psychological consequences of racism (on attitudes, stereotypes, representations, identities and self-esteem), we have chosen empirical projects and theoretical discussions that focus on the moments in which racist and racialising practices are made visible, unsettled and so disrupted.” [Caroline Howarth and Derek Hook, “Towards a Critical Social Psychology of Racism: Points of Disruption.” Editorial. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Volume 15, issue 6, November/December 2005. Pages 425-431.]

“The attempt to translate the dynamics of capitalist relations of production into individual character and pathology is then concretized by a specific analysis of the actual conditions of the labor process and its class differential effects on the lives of workers. [Michael] Schneider’s analysis indicated a willingness to: specify the meaning of the whole at the level of social organization; describe the dynamics of the individual in relation to a central category of Marxist social theory that has been systematically neglected by previous critical social psychologies – labor; and finally, describe the relation between personal life and the operation of a societal institution other than the family.” [Philip Wexler, “Alternative viewpoints: foundations of a critical social psychology.” Counterpoints. Volume 16, 1996. Pages 55-76.]

“The need for a critical social psychology, now no less than before, is a response to social conditions that are perceived as problematic, threatening and undesirable. The twin classical problematic of the alternative social psychologies has been class consciousness and Fascism. Within this general social problematic, each theorist has had particular goals: sexual freedom, critical thought and aesthetic capacity; the removal of the conditions which induce developmental ‘stuntedness’; the realization of the possibilities of individual social autonomy; reduction of the repression of the concrete sensuous experience by the abstraction of exchange value and wage-labor; the transformation of socially reproductive neurosis into the freeing schizoid flow of psychosis; the disintegration of the normal ego; the emergence of a collective subject.” [Philip Wexler, “Dimensions of a critical social psychology: production, lived experience and class.” Counterpoints. Volume 16, 1996. Pages 77-93.]

“… I wish to share some ideas for teaching an alternative social psychology—a critical social psychology …—that provides new ways of seeing some standard social psychological issues and that may help us to meet our goals more satisfactorily. I wish primarily to do two things here: first, to offer for consideration alternative conceptual material, and second, to show how I use such material in class to highlight its importance for an understanding of our everyday lives.” [Jeff Lashbrook, “Notes toward Teaching a Critical Social Psychology.” Teaching Sociology. Volume 19, number 2, April 1991. Pages 182-185.]

“… CCP [critical community psychology] considers happiness as neither the result of personal achievements, nor the outcome of national policies aimed increasing GDP [gross domestic product] or improving the welfare system; rather, it is a constant relationship between the resources and the opportunities provided by context – together with the community to which people belong –, and the best use they decide to make of them.…

“In fact, CCP studies the interactions between individual and contexts, specifically taking into account relational, organizational, cultural, economic and political domains, both taken independently and in their reciprocal interactions ….”

[Caterina Arcidiacono and Salvatore Di Martino, “A Critical Analysis of Happiness and Well-being. Where We Stand, Where We Need to Go.” Community Psychology in Global Perspective. Volume 2, issue 1, 2016. Pages 6-35.]

“… in the context of resistance to oppression and social transformation, critical community psychology-oriented work of recovery and memory, supporting the elicitation and articulation of individual and collective narratives, the assertion of inclusive collective agency, and the restoration of marginal communities’ own stories of historical and contemporary realities, people, and places, obtains liberatory significance …. I aim to critically describe a people’s history project, namely, The Eldorado Park Oral History Project, as an enactment of critical community psychology that focused on facilitating expressions of individual and collective narratives, the affirmation of social agency, and the restitution of a marginal community’s own generative narratives of past and contemporary realities.” [Mohamed Seedat, “Oral History as an Enactment of Critical Community Psychology.” Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 3, number 1, January 2015. Pages 22-35.]

“The primary purpose of this paper was to inform a more critical community psychology using an interdisciplinary approach in both process and content to synthesizing concepts of power and action shared with other critical scholarship. Through an analysis of power and action we examined the extent to which seven leading ‘critical school’ journals offer a transformative and epistemic challenge to the status quo, a concern shared by many community psychologists.” [Heather Davidson, Scot Evans, Cynthia Ganote, Jorie Henrickson, Lynette Jacobs-Priebe, Diana L. Jones, Isaac Prilleltensky, Manuel Riemer, “Power and Action in Critical Theory Across Disciplines: Implications for Critical Community Psychology.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 38, number 1–2, September 2006. Pages 35-49.]

“… in this contribution we propose to integrate the approach of degrowth with that of Critical Community psychology (CCP). Community Psychology in its critical variant is an emerging approach particularly committed to promoting individual and social well-being through the adoption of an ecological, justice-oriented, and value-based perspective ….

“… Critical Community psychologists work on promoting quality of life through the advancement of justice, democracy, environmental preservation, development of capabilities, and freedom of choice ….”

[Alfredo Natale, Salvatore Di Martino, Fortuna Procentese, and Caterina Arcidiacono, “De-growth and critical community psychology: Contributions towards individual and social well-being.” Futures. Volume 78–79, April–May 2006. Pages 47-56.]

“… I defend the necessity of substantive, constructive political theory in addition to theory that is primarily ‘critical’ in nature, yet validate realist complaints about the abstract ‘normative’ approach to it that currently predominates.…

“The problem with a purely critical theory is that it does not address the concrete dilemmas we face, where there are always tradeoffs, complexities, and conflicting ideals.…

“… [There is] ‘normative’ theory …. The term normative is often used within the community of political theorists to refer to … broadly analytic theory focused on consistent general principles, clear concepts, and abstract ideals ….

“… The disciplinary community of ‘realist’ political theorists who are unsatisfied with critical and abstract normative approaches, I argue, ought to adopt a Deweyan ‘predictive’ method of inquiry ….”

[Samuel Bagg, “Between Critical and Normative Theory: Predictive Political Theory as a Deweyan Realism.” Political Research Quarterly. Volume 69, number 2, 2016. Pages 233-244.]

“For simplicity’s sake, I have written as if my main problem were to show how, in the face of a supposed difficulty, a strictly realistic theory of the perceptual event may be maintained. But my interest is primarily in the facts, and in the theory only because of the facts it formulates. The significance of the facts of the case may, perhaps, be indicated by a consideration which has thus far been ignored.” [John Dewey, “Brief Studies in Realism. I.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Volume 8, number 15, July 1911. Pages 393-400.]

“Until the epistemological realists have seriously considered the main propositions of the pragmatic realists, viz., that knowing is something that happens to things in the natural course of their career, not the sudden introduction of a ‘unique’ and non-natural type of relation—that to a mind or consciousness—they are hardly in a position to discuss the second and derived pragmatic proposition that, in this natural continuity, things in becoming known undergo a specific and detectable qualitative change.” [John Dewey, “Brief Studies in Realism. II.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Volume 8, number 20, September 1911. Pages 546-554.]

“Speaking of the matter only for myself, the presuppositions and tendencies of pragmatism are distinctly realistic; not idealistic in any sense in which idealism connotes or is connoted by the theory of knowledge. (Idealistic in the ethical sense is another matter, and one whose associations with epistemological idealism, aside from the accidents of history, are chiefly verbal.)” [John Dewey, “The Realism of Pragmatism.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Volume 2, number 12, June 1905. Pages 324-327.]

“… in addition to arguing that a proper understanding of some of [Karl] Marx’s most fundamental commitments requires us to fight not only for human but for non-human animal liberation, I also argue that genuine animal liberation requires the radical disruption of capitalism and that the more common, less radical animal liberation movements are insufficient for bringing about this end.…

“… although I join other Marxists and Critical Theorists in arguing that neither traditional (liberal) rights-based nor utilitarian attempts to bring about animal liberation are sufficient for achieving this end and that genuine animal liberation requires the radical disruption of capitalism, my view rests, first and foremost, on my claim that we have a moral obligation to structure our communities so that the flourishing of animals, as individuals (not species groups), is truly respected. In this connection, I argue that individual animal flourishing is not considered less significant than the flourishing of humans, and I take care to show that the focus on individual animals need not succumb to the troublesome consequences of the traditional arguments for animal liberation, which claim that the actions of concerned individuals is sufficient to achieve justice for animals.”

[Corinne Painter, “Non-human animals within contemporary capitalism: A Marxist account of non-human animal liberation.” Capital & Class. Volume 40, number 2, 2016. Pages 325-343.]

“Philosophers have sought to understand the world. The point, however, is to change it.

“—Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, No. 11 …

“These interests inform my political work: within the left, my task has been to argue that our relations with the rest of nature cannot be separated from a global struggle for human liberation, and within the ecology movement my task has been to challenge the ‘harmony of nature’ idealism of early environmentalism and to insist on identifying the social relations that lead to the present dysfunction. At the same time my politics have determined my scientific ethics. I believe that all theories are wrong that promote, justify, or tolerate injustice.”

[Richard Levins, “Living the Eleventh Thesis.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 67, issue 11, April 2016. Pages 47-54.]

“Relational theorists reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pre-given units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis (as in the self-actional perspective). Individual persons, whether strategic or norm following, are inseparable from the transactional contexts within which they are embedded ….

“… Freedom … means nothing apart from the concrete transactions in which individuals engage, within cultural, social structural, and social psychological contexts of action; it derives its significance entirely from the ongoing interplay (akin to a game) of decision, consequence, and reaction.…

“… the relational point of view sees agency as inseparable from the unfolding dynamics of situations, especially from the problematic features of those situations.…

“… Paradoxically (for a mode of study so intently focused upon processuality), relational sociology has the greatest difficulty in analyzing, not the structural features of static networks, whether these be cultural, social structural, or social psychological, but rather, the dynamic processes that transform those matrices of transactions in some fashion. Even studies of ‘processes-in-relations,’ in other words, too often privilege spatiality (or topological location) over temporality and narrative unfolding.”

[Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 103, number 2, September 1997. Pages 281-317.]

“Two decades have passed since those days—approximately a decade and a half since I myself penned a ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’ …. During that time, the discourse seems gradually, almost imperceptibly, to have shifted from an adversarial to a paradigm-building spirit, from negative to positive, from critical to affirmative. To be sure, there still are invocations of the old antagonists, usually portrayed as structure or action based; as holistic or individualistic. There also are allusions to rival stances that claim to be relational. But to a conspicuous degree, there is greater concern now to explore affiliations with friends … than there is to struggle intellectually against enemies. There also is greater attention paid to theory-building than there is to theoretical struggle.”

[Mustafa Emirbayer, “Relational Sociology as Fighting Words.” Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Pages 209-211.]

“Putting relational theory into practice entails challenging the validity of economistic perspectives toward inequality, chiefly by showing how social classifications and categories (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality) exercise a determining influence over the distribution of wages, jobs, and economic opportunities over and above market variables.…

“Yet important areas of ambiguity and uncertainty have accompanied this relational turn, threatening to derail much of the progress this movement has made. Focusing primarily on the study of workplace inequality, we provide in this article a critical reconnaissance of relational thinking, identifying what we find to be the major virtues and limitations evident within three distinct strands of social scientific thinking.”

[Steven Vallas and Emily Cummins, “Relational Models of Organizational Inequalities: Emerging Approaches and Conceptual Dilemmas.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 58, number 2, February 2014. Pages 228-255.]

“Besides asserting the value of women’s relational skills, the relational theorists contend that the autonomy and independence so admired in men are, to some extent, an illusion.…

“… when codependency is reconsidered in the context of the relational model of women’s development, a much richer yet more subtle fabric of meaning is uncovered—one with significant implications for treatment.

“At its most universal, codependency is the tendency to expect external sources of fulfillment and to seek identity and self-worth outside the self. It is evident how this society encourages unrealistic expectations of happiness and the inordinate valuing of external objects and achievements in both men and women.”

[Elizabeth Zelvin, “Applying Relational Theory to the Treatment of Women’s Addictions.” Affilia. Volume 14, number 1, spring 1999. Pages 9-23.]

“The very concept of a relational therapist that ‘holds’ is paradoxical. The therapist has the ability to hold and to contain his patient, but this patient is not a helpless baby and the therapist is not his mother. At the same time, the analyst himself is affected by the process that the patient is undergoing and reacts to this from a very personal place as well. The question remains whether the analyst knows exactly what the patient ‘needs,’ for at times, even the most empathic response could be experienced as intrusive.” [Herzel Yogev, “Holding in Relational Theory and Group Analysis.” Group Analysis. Volume 41, number 4, December 2008. Pages 373-390.]

“Relational theory has developed a conception of dissociative self-state phenomena in its understanding of enactment. Yet the dissociative model of mind fails to provide a satisfactory framework for changes in the relational organization of the dyad. We present here an alternative conception that in emphasizing dyadic process shifts the therapeutic focus from what currently are understood to be memories from the past to the present interaction of analyst and patient. We will show how from this perspective the distinction begins to break down between enactment and the subtle back-and-forth in relation.” [The Boston Change Process Study Group, “Enactment and the Emergence of New Relational Organization.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Volume 61, number 4, August 2013. Pages 727-749.]

“This article takes as its central task the development of a more sociological approach to earnings inequality. We focus on earnings since they are both central to the supply–demand framework and arguably the most broadly influential aspect of social stratification on individual and household well-being. We show that the favored supply and demand mechanism sociology has explicitly or implicitly adopted suffers from sufficient empirical anomalies that we should rethink our reliance on this borrowed conceptual apparatus. We develop an approach to that focuses on social relations within organizations as the central and most proximate causal field generating income distributions. The mechanism we propose that researchers adopt in place of supply and demand in labor markets is relational claims-making within organizations.…

“What is most distinctive about this model is that in contrast to the entire supply–demand framework the basic unit of analysis is not the individual embedded in aggregate market structures, but the social relationship in its organizational context. We think this is consistent with the key sociological insight that social relations, not individual properties, generate social outcomes.”

[Dustin Avent-Holt and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, “A Relational Theory of Earnings Inequality.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 58, number 3, March 2014. Pages 379-399.]

“Most sociological ethnographies are either of places (e.g., neighborhoods, workplaces) or groups (e.g., single mothers, political activists). This article presents an alternative to group- and place-based fieldwork: relational ethnography. Relational ethnography takes as its scientific object neither a bounded group defined by members’ shared social attributes nor a location delimited by the boundaries of a particular neighborhood or the walls of an organization but rather processes involving configurations of relations among different actors or institutions.” [Matthew Desmond, “Relational ethnography.” Theory and Society. Volume 43, number 5, September 2014. Pages 547-579.]

“This paper argues that the given single-level conceptualisations of diversity management within the territory of legal or organisational policy fail to capture the relational interplay of structural- and agentic-level concerns of equality …. Departing from single-level conceptualisations, the paper proposes a relational framework that takes into consideration multilevel factors when developing a context-specific approach to diversity management.” [Jawad Syeda and Mustafa Özbilgin, “A relational framework for international transfer of diversity management practices.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management. Volume 20, number 12, December 2009. Pages 2435-2453.]

“… relationalism is a theoretical perspective based in pragmatism that eschews Cartesian dualism, substantialism, and essentialism while embracing emergence, experience, practice, and creativity. It includes some but not all social network analysts, field theorists, actor-network researchers, economic sociologists, a number of comparative-historical researchers, and of course card-carrying relationalists ….” [Emily Erikson, “Relationalism Emergent.” Contemporary Sociology. Volume 44, number 1, 2014. Pages 3-7.]

“… interpersonal or relational empowerment included belonging to a group and associated feelings such as confidence derived from group membership and solidarity. It also included a commitment to passing on the values associated with collective activity to future members. Finally, empowered youth expressed their desire to empower others in their organization.” [Brian D. Christens, “Toward Relational Empowerment.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 50, numbers 1–2, September 2012. Pages 114-128.]

“… I contend that there are two different understandings of the connection between the qualifier ‘relational’ and the concept of power. I refer to them as ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ relationalism. The labels designate certain ideal types of arguments, not geographical locations (although the obvious connotation with a similar division in philosophy is intentional). With no intention to downplay either the contribution of SNA [social network analysis] or the importance of the symposium, I nevertheless argue that the participants presented only the Anglo-American perspective on relationalism and that introducing the Continental understanding would add value for political science.” [Peeter Selg, “Two Faces of the ‘Relational Turn.’” PS: Political Science & Politics. Volume 49, number 1, January 2016. Pages 27-31.]

“A relational perspective leads to a reconstruction of our key concepts. These concepts are no longer conceived as a pre-defined entity.They must be redefined as relational concepts which imply that they are constituted in a process or in a process of ‘structuration’. In other words, a concept such as society is dissolved from being conceived as an ‘autonomous, internally organized, self-sustaining system with naturally bounded, integrated, sovereign entities as national states or countries’ … to ‘a diversity of intersecting networks of social interaction’ ….” [Lars Bo Kaspersen and Norman Gabriel, “The importance of survival units for Norbert Elias’s figurational perspective.” The Sociological Review. Volume 56, number 3, 2008. Pages 370-387.]

“While a number of key figures in the history of sociological thought recognized the relationality inherent in human social life, that way of thinking did not get effectively translated into conventional sociological concepts as they were used in teaching and research. There are concerted efforts to change this; contemporary scholars across the continents have been picking up the diverse threads of a more relational sociology. A significant portion of contemporary theorizing revolves around efforts to push our thinking and our vocabulary more explicitly in the direction of dynamic relations and away from substances into which the notion of ‘action’ must somehow be integrated.” [Debbie Kasper, “Advancing Sociology through a Focus on Dynamic Relations.” Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Pages 67-86.]

“From this starting point I propose that we treat levels of analysis or macro–micro distinctions as contingently useful heuristics rather than as essential features of phenomena. Likewise, I propose an irrealist stance based on the tendency of radical relationism to connect rather than separate subjects and objects of knowledge. This framework allows us to treat structure and agency as nonopposed on the grounds that we can parse the same phenomena in structural or agential terms depending on our epistemological objectives. Applied reflexively to social-scientific intellectual production, this framework implies a relational relativism that avoids both the solipsism of subjectivist or individualist relativism and the reifications of holist or functionalist relativisms. This relational relativism provides an intellectual justification for the provisional status of all scientific knowledge and makes explicit our own implication, as knowledge-producers, in the contents of scientific accounts of the world. Radical relationism also has implications for the justification and negotiation of ethical claims, without implying one particular ethics of its own.” [Christopher Powell, “Radical Relationism: A Proposal.” Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Pages 188-207.]

“In this book the aesthetic just isn’t optional candy on top of objects, nor is it some dating service that bonds them together (since they are ontologically separated). As part of the project of object-oriented ontology (ooo), the philosophy whose first architect is Graham Harman, this book liberates the aesthetic from its ideological role as matchmaker between subject and object, a role it has played since the days of [Immanuel] Kant.…

“This is a book about realism without matter. Matter, in current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself.…

“Nature likewise is ‘discovered in the use of useful things.’ I take use here to apply not only to humans, but also to bees with their flowers and hives, chimpanzees with their digging sticks, slime molds with their wet pavements. This is not an argument about how humans impose meaning on mute things. It’s an argument about the fact that what humans call matter and Nature are ontologically secondary to something else. A sort of backward glance confers the material status of matter and the natural status of Nature: the backward glance not of a cognizing being, necessarily, but of a task accomplished. The key turns in the lock: ‘Oh, that’s what the key was for.’ There must, then, be something ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ matter—and object-oriented ontology (ooo) gives us a term for this: simply, what is behind matter is an object.…

“… Relations thus contain a nullity that collapses forwards as more relations are built onto them. This tumbling nullity is what is called time. Because they are to-come, relations evoke a feeling of process: hence the illusion that things are processes, that process relationism is the most adequate description of how things are. Yet because time emerges from relations we can never specify in advance what they will be. Process relationism is an ontic or ontotheological attempt to pin down exactly what things are, by way of what ooo sees as an inevitable parody of what things are: causal events. Process relationism tries to reduce the intrinsic ambiguity of relations between things. These relations are inherently contradictory, like the relations you have with a Turner painting in the Tate Britain, versus the ones your friend has.…

“Forget the valuation of the schizophrenic against the neurotic, and focus on the descriptive language. This is the pure poetry of process relationism. It’s perfect for evoking the persistence of objects, the way they stay themselves, for a time at any rate, before they break, before they die. ooo shouldn’t abandon processes. It should think them as part of a larger configuration space. Processes are wonderful metaphors for existence: existing, continuing, flourishing, living. The very failures of process relationism, as we shall see—its failure to account for time as an inherent feature of objects—turns out to be a virtue, insofar as the magical illusion of the present is a feeling of being ‘in’ time, just as one is immersed in the water of a swimming pool or the pulsing rhythms of a nightclub.”

[Timothy Morton. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press imprint of Michigan Publishing. 2013. Creative Commons. Pages 19, 42-43, 94, and 153.]

“The existence of a text is its coexistence with at least one (1+n) withdrawn entity. This is far from the whole OOO [object-oriented ontology] truth, but from an OOO standpoint, it is the radar echo from the tip of an object-oriented iceberg. OOO is truly post-Derridean, rather than a regression from Derrida back into an affirmative or positivistic process relationism ([Alfred North] Whitehead, [Manuel] De Landa). Most materialisms are indeed forms of relationism, since they imagine things to be patterns of smaller things, or snapshots of larger things. This view is so entrenched that it is very difficult to think past it. We are too accustomed, argues OOO, to seeing things as patterns and not as objects.

“Instead of materialism, OOO draws on the ugly duckling of Aristotle’s four causes, formal causation.”

[Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History. Volume 43, number 2, spring 2012. Pages 205-224.]

“Although the central challenge is that of bringing the reality of relationship into clear view, I do not intend this work as an exercise in theory. I am not interested in creating a work fit only for academic consumption. Rather, my attempt is to link this view of relationship to our daily lives. The concept of relational being should ultimately gain its meaning from our ways of going on together. By cementing the concept to forms of action, my hope is also to invite transformation in our institutions—in our classrooms, organizations, research laboratories, therapy offices, places of worship, and chambers of government. It is the future of our lives together that is at stake here, both locally and globally.

“The reader must be warned. This proposal for a relation-centered alternative to the traditional view of self will be discomforting. A critical challenge to the self has broad ramifications. We commonly suppose, for example, that people have effects on each other. As we say, parents mold their children’s personality, schools have effects on students’ minds, and the mass media have an impact on the attitudes and values of the population. Yet, this common presumption of cause and effect is at one with the tradition of bounded being. That is, it relies on conception of fundamentally separate entities, related to each other like the collision of billiard balls. In the present work I will propose that we move beyond cause and effect in understanding relationships. Nor, by bracketing the presumption of cause and effect, do I mean to celebrate determinism’s alter, namely free will. The view of a freely choosing agent also sustains the tradition of bounded being. The vision of relational being will invite us, then, to set aside the freedom/determinism opposition, and to consider the world in terms of relational confluence.”

[Kenneth J. Gergen. Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. Page xv-xvi.]

“The book itself was born of passion. It begins with a critique of the longstanding Western tradition in which individual self has served as the fundamental atom of society. My concerns are with the ways in which this tradition lends itself to a ‘me-first’ mentality, in which individual control, self-perfection, dominance, and alienation are favored. Relationships, on this account, are secondary and largely instrumental. ‘What can he or she give me?How much will it cost me?’ Nor am I sanguine about the traditional alternative to individualism—namely, communalism. Here we simply replace one form of bounded and self-seeking entity with another. I am not opting for abandoning these longstanding conceptions; they are useful constructions for some purposes. However, it was my major purpose to add to our human potentials by articulating an alternative way of understanding ourselves, one in which relational process stands at the center of all intelligible action.” [Kenneth J. Gergen, “Relational Being: A Brief Introduction.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology. Volume 24, issue 4, October–December 2011. Pages 280-282.]

“Relational being is offered as an augmentation—an addition to our potentials—as opposed to a denial. It is fruitless to debate whether we “really and truly” are free agents or not, but many of our ways of life do rely on such a discourse. The question for me is thus whether we wish to sustain all such ways of life and, if not, whether we must then capitulate to the deleterious implications of an otherwise hegemonic determinism.” [Kenneth J. Gergen, “Relational Being in Question: A Reply to My Colleagues.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology. Volume 24, issue 4, October–December 2011. Pages 314-320.]

“No matter how we paint an ontologically uncommitted and pluralistic bricolage (to borrow [Kenneth J.] Gergen’s term), there must always be a bricoleur whose commitments and assumptions precede and found that synthesis. In this sense, constructionism is only ontologically mute in the way that agnosticism is theologically mute—that is, through the rather expressive discourse of a pointed silence. Just as agnosticism is not simply a reservation of theological judgment but the denial of any basis for such judgments, the constructionism underlying Relational Being is also a denial of the basis for ontological judgments.” [Joshua W. Clegg, “The Ontological Commitments of Relational Philosophy.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology. Volume 24, issue 4, October–December 2011. Pages 324-327.]

“In ‘Relational Being,’ Gergen raises the issue of man as a bounded individual, versus man as created by his relationships. Compared to many of his predecessors, the way in which Gergen conducts his discourse has some important advantages. Among these, his use of examples is immediately outstanding. All major points in his argument are illustrated and backed not only by examples, but by examples drawn from real everyday situations and practices.” [Bjørn Gustavsen, “Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community.” Review article. International Journal of Action Research. Volume 6, number 1, 2010. Pages 139-146.]

“The expanding global discourse on education is built on the concept of individualism. One emerging direction in educational theory that challenges this discourse is relational pedagogy.…

“This article aims to discuss some characteristic aspects of relational pedagogy and thereby proposing a theoretical course in the field. By comparing Kenneth Gergen’s and Martin Buber’s relational conceptions, the article argues that relational pedagogy could or should be characterized by a distinction between two basic relational dimensions, tentatively labeled co-existence and co-operation.”

[J. Aspelin, “Co-Existence and Co-Operation: The Two-Dimensional Conception of Education.” Education. Volume 1, number 1, 2011. Pages 6-11.]

“I would characterize … [the] emerging consensus as a reflective pragmatism ….

“The two most widely shared assumptions lending themselves to a reflective pragmatism are as follows:

“Whatever exists makes no necessary requirements on representation.…

“What stands as objective truth can be established within a research tradition.…

“Emerging in the 1930’s, the critical movement in the social sciences has now spawned multiple sites of activity across the disciplines.… As … reflected more fully in the liberatory movement more generally …, the attempt is to draw critical attention to existing ways of life, and to engender a critical consciousness from which social change might spring. The hope is that ‘seeing with new eyes’ can incite resistance to the status quo.”

[Kenneth J. Gergen, “From Mirroring to World-Making: Research as Future Forming.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 45, issue 3, 2014. Pages 287-310.]

“If we are to move away from the hype and look at what the facts have to say, we will find that all these extravagant claims are nothing but blatant lies. The harsh reality about globalisation is that it is nothing but ‘recolonisation’ in a new garb. The third world countries are being transformed into economic colonies of the developed, or imperialist, countries – the same imperialist powers who had once before directly colonised them. In the name of ‘free market’ and ‘free trade,’ multinational corporations and banks of the West are re-entering the third world economies to plunder their wealth and resources. The imperialists are not enforcing this new colonial order by force as they once did in the 19ᵗʰ and early 20ᵗʰ centuries. They don’t need to. The ruling classes of the third world countries themselves are betraying the interests of their people and countries. They are voluntarily handing over control of the economies of their countries to Western corporations and governments and the international financial institutions controlled by them. The third world elites are of course being well-rewarded for their treachery: they are getting a share of the imperialist plunder of their own countries.

“This re-colonisation – or globalisation – has had catastrophic consequences on the livelihood of billions of people throughout the third world. All the gains in living standards made by the common people in these countries in the 1960s and 1970s are being rolled back. The new economic order being imposed on them is killing of hunger and preventable or curable diseases more men, women and children every three years than all those killed by World War II in six years.”

[Neeraj Jain. Globalisation or Recolonisation? Pune, India: Alka Joshi. 2013. Pages 6-7.]

“What has to be done here (and is, in fact, being done, that is lived, and, alas, more rarely, depicted and visualised) is to refuse the authorisation (which is very complex: authority-expertise, value(s) – reward(s), author-of-our-own-words/works, etc., etc.) on offer, as the only possible form of being (depicting, textualising, re-presenting). This refusal is in/formed from the body, from/by imaginactions based on practical, hopeful, possibilities. This is a far from easy task since all challenges (alternations to, supplementations of) against ‘The Social’ tend to ‘stall’ and ‘dissipate’ because they are claimed always along one axis. Thus, for example, where ‘Authority’ is seen, and organised against, as ‘The Main Enemy’ questions of socially significant difference tend to disappear or be deferred (like all jouissance [enjoyment]) to some ‘later moment’ – that is ‘Authority’ becomes homogenised. In the contrary, where ‘Difference’ is established axiologically, then the ways that the ‘figure in dominance’ entails, embodies ‘Authority’ is usually ignored.” [Philip Corrigan, “On Visualisation as Power—‘Innocent stupidities’: de-picturing (human) nature. On hopeful resistances and possible refusals: celebrating difference(s) – again” The Sociological Review. Volume 35, supplement 1, May 1987. Pages 255-281.]

“… I think some lasting liberation is occurring in individuals for whom I have the deepest respect. But some of the most severe problems are also quite apparent already: our previous attitudes toward school – both students’ and faculty’s – get in the way of creating open space and even more of building in the space we do make; the pressure of peers and parents who are frightened of freedom is sometimes severe; many students’ own self-regard is so low that freedom and personal responsibility are feared; and the timetable of the academic year tends to make us very impatient for visible results. Working at this sort of education is exciting, and I think that we are much less alienated than those in the regular freshman program of courses, but I’m afraid that the new program could either gradually slide into being a bureaucratically-run ‘innovative’ program, or we could learn so well to set ourselves free that the administration would discontinue the program. As long as we, as a learning community, can walk this tightrope we may ‘do a little good.’” [David Bramhall, “Toward A Theory and Practice of the Radical Classroom.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 6, number 4, January 1975. Pages 55-65.]

“I will not insist on the observational difficulties that it [my hypothesis] raises, which research should soon be able to resolve. I have indicated elsewhere … how it articulates with the theory of social representations, so that it is unnecessary to come back to this here. It will suffice to mention here the question to which it must answer, the principal fact to explain.… Furthermore, it would contradict itself, if we did so. It relies itself on a shared representation of man’s nature, and is culturally obliged to stick to it. As it is not proven that this representation is unique, one can raise the question: Is there another one which leads to using processes of inference forbidden by science, and for which presumed biases, shortcomings and illusions have an immediate legitimacy, as long as common sense prevails? Is it inadmissible, in fact, that this substantial part of psychic activity should needlessly take place in our society.…

“According to the proposed hypothesis, the social representation centred on the individual would tend to favour the subjective anchorage. It imposes on everyone to define himself or herself, to be responsible for his or her choices, to behave under all circumstances like the author of his or her acts and to express a point of view to his or her own.”

[Serge Moscovici, “The new magical thinking.” Public Understanding of Science. Volume 23, number 7, 2014. Pages 759-779.]

“The main aim of the theory of social representations is clear. By focusing on everyday communication and thinking, it hopes to determine the link between human psychology and modern social and cultural trends. It has begun to arouse interest, stimulating research in a number of places, with the notorious exception of the United States. What explains this interest? The theory undoubtedly legitimates concern for social aspects and enriches the phenomenology of our discipline, which had become extremely meagre. It is better suited for dealing with specific situations than other theories that were conceived for more abstract and on the whole artificial set-ups. Because of this extension. in all likelihood. people are beginning to notice numerous points of convergence between this theory and various currents such as ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, etc.” [Serge Moscovici, “Notes towards a description of Social Representations.” European Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 18, number 3, July 1988. Pages 211-250.]

“My purpose here is … present the findings of that research, but to outline a few thoughts about how our theory of social representations might be able to contribute to a study of the interaction between a minority that suffers discrimination and the majority that discriminates against it, or, in a word, of prejudices and relations between groups. This will also shed some new light on a very old phenomenon to which most research in social psychology has been devoted.

“First, a social representation, like any human representation, is both intellectual and figurative; it is a network of concepts and symbols with an imaginary element …. Second, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that common sense exists not only in all humans, but that it is also the sense on which the life of the community is based.”

[Serge Moscovici, “An essay on social representations and ethnic minorities.” Social Science Information. Volume 50, numbers 3–4, 2011. Pages 442-461.]

“The paradox of the theory of social representations, i.e. being both general and particular, is by no means the effect of chance. On the contrary, it is due to the profound nature of the theory and explains its power. But that is not really the point I want to make. The point is that during the last decade we have dedicated many efforts to highlighting the general aspect of social representations, so as to contrast our theory with the individualistic, non-social conception prevalent in our science.…

“… What seems to me obvious, at least, is that communication so to speak secretes the structure of a representation by changing the potential content into an actual one and part of the ordinary beliefs into extraordinary beliefs, some notions or images into values. That is to say it generates our commonsense in which nothing is taken for granted, everything has to be reinvented and reconfirmed for people to reach a consensus and hold firmly to this consensus – until they suddenly waver in their consensus and try to change it as everyone knows.”

[Serge Moscovici, “Introductory Address.” Papers on Social Representations – Textes sur les Représentations Sociales. Volume 2, number 3, 1993. Pages 160-170.]

“… subjects haunting our laboratories episodically possess a coherent system not only of explanations but also of descriptions of the common situation. That is, to use language that should be familiar to us, they possess a social representation within which they observe things and observe themselves, account for their actions and give them a meaning. The reports they give are probably correct within the framework of that shared description and incorrect within the experimenter’s. One can safely speculate that this representation causes the limitation of the cognitive processes at the moment of introspection and also is responsible for the fact that the individuals are or are not conscious of what the experimenter wants them to be. This seems to me perfectly reasonable.” [Serge Moscovici, “The Return of the Unconscious.” Social Research. Volume 60, number 1, spring 1993. Pages 39-93.]

“The effects of influence attempts by a majority and by a minority were examined on both a manifest response level and a latent perceptual level. Female subjects were exposed to a series of blue slides that were consistently labeled as green by a female confederate. The confederate was presented as a member of either a majority or a minority. On each trial, subjects were required to indicate the color of the slide presented and the color of the afterimage perceived on a white screen following removal of the slide. It was predicted that (a) the subject’s judgment of the chromatic afterimage would be modified when the influence agent represented a minority, and (b) this modification will be more pronounced when the source of influence is absent than when it is present. The results supported the prediction in both the main study and its replication.…

“Taken together, our observations tend to show that the conflict of responses on a verbal-judgment level is transposed and may be resolved on a perceptual level. It remains, of course, to separate these different factors (social, cognitive, perceptual) and to obtain more conclusive evidence about their respective roles. To do this we do not need new experimental designs so much as new experimental techniques, enabling us to understand complex, multilevel behavior.”

[Serge Moscovici and Bernard Personnaz, “Studies in Social Influence: V. Minority Influence and Conversion Behavior in a Perceptual Task.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 16, 1980. Pages 270-282.]

“We shall refer in this section to studies concerned mainly with the gathering of information of a general type. These studies have essentially a scientific nature by virtue of the tools used, not of the objectives involved. In form and content, these studies are representative of a state of mind and a procedure which have not varied very much in many years. They are so numerous that they should be mentioned only to give a few examples with no attempt to be exhaustive.” [Serge Moscovici, “Attitudes and Opinions.” Annual Review of Psychology. Volume 14, 1963. Pages 231-260.]

“This paper is a preliminary report of a cross-national experimental research program which is concerned with the determinants of competitive and cooperative choice behavior. The general objective of the program is to make experimental tests of hypotheses in different national settings. Secondarily, descriptive cross-national data are of interest because of the insight they provide into cultural forces that shape the personality in the socialization process. We shall first sketch the methodological and substantive backgrounds of our research, and then present some findings and tentative conclusions reached by some preliminary experiments.” [Claude Faucheux, Serge Moscovici, Marcello Cesa-Bianchi, Grazia Magistretti, Gustavo Iacono, and Guilia Villone, “The Role of Self-Esteem in Competitive Choice Behavior.” International Journal of Psychology. Volume 2, number 3, 1967. Pages 147-159.]

“… the absolute difference (without regard to sign) betwecn the two judgments made at the beginning of each trial is taken as a measure of cognitive conflict. It is the most appropriate measure here because it is a direct representation of the cognitive difference the subjects experience at the moment their judgments differ.” [Kenneth R. Hammond, Gabriella Bartoli Bonaiuto, Claude Faucheux, Serve Moscovici, Werner D. Frölich, C. Richard B. Joyce, “A Comparison of Cognitive Conflict Between Persons in Western Europe and the United States.” International Journal of Psychology. Volume 3, number 1, 1968. Pages 1-12.]

“The results [of this study] … suggest that in a game against a nonpersonal agent the representation of his opponent, whether it is seen as chance or by nature, will noticeably affect the subject’s behavior.” [Claude Faucheux and Serve Moscovici, “Self-Esteem and Exploitative Behavior in a Game Against Chance and Nature.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 8, number 1, 1968. Pages 83-88.]

“Here lies the motive force of polemics: through paradox, one makes use of the opponent’s weapons in order to discover one᾿s own truth. Just as the murkiness of a rainy day is suddenly lit up by a bolt of lightning, our habitual representations are then bathed in an uncanny light, and frozen bits of reality are thrust toward the observer. After exhausting the sequence of contrasts, one sees the dawning of a grand new harmony at the edge of the known world.” [Serge Moscovici, “The Proper Use of Polemics.” Yale French Studies. Number 58, 1979. Pages 55-83.]

“In previous studies, we always used two confederates to represent the minority. This is because the response of a single confederate to a physical stimulus could have been rejected by saying that the individual was eccentric, that he/she didn’t understand the task, etc. By introducing a second confederate, we eliminated the possibility of attributing the ‘green’ response to personal factors. If two independent people make the same response, the subject is obliged to attribute it, at least partially, to the stimulus itself. In present experiment, we tried to reach this goal by informing subjects t other people had previously given the same response as the confederate.” [Serge Moscovici, “Studies in Social Influence: V. Minority Influence and Conversion Behavior in a Perceptual Task.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 16, 1980. Pages 270-282.]

“AAmong the transactions that teachers, in their organisational role, have with children will be evaluations of performances, distribution of assistance in the classroom, and application or enforcement of institutional regulations. In the present research we decided to focus on transactions in these areas as a means of discovering children’s beliefs about organisational roles. The research had two aims, firstly to determine what representations children of different ages and backgrounds hold for this role, and secondly whether these representations correspond to [Max] Weber’s image of bureaucracies generally. Thus, for example, do children regard the teacher’s authority to make rules or decisions as formally limited in some way? Are there seen to be appropriate criteria for role performance? And do children believe that formal role-relations are in some sense distinct from purely personal relationships?” [Nicholas Elmer, Jocelyne Ohana, and Serge Moscovici, “Children’s Beliefs about Institutional Roles: A Cross-National Study of Representations of the Teacher’s Role.” British Journal of Educational Psychology. Volume 57, 1987. Pages 26-37.]

“Principally they [social representations] are networks or systems of statements, images, etc., intended to provide a group with the vehicles of mental Life and communication that are necessary to it, vehicles which in fact are required for every collective action of some duration. We have always asserted. and held it as a principle, that the anchoring of these representations is to be found in the collective fabric. Individuals are concerned inasmuch as they belong to this web and constitute its corporeal substance. This means, with regard to the procedure we followed, that we took care to anchor the representations we studied in a shared meaning, avoiding adherence to this or that person’s idiosyncrasies. It is not that we are too individualistic but that we are not individualistic enough to account for the nature of the society in which we live.” [Serge Moscovici, “The Origin of Social Representations: A Response to Michael.” New Ideas in Psychology. Volume 8, number 3, 1990. Pages 383-388.]

“… what justifies the prevalence granted to the neurological within the ‘material’—a bias that may lead to error through the idea that mental representation is the mere shadow and docile reflection of a network of neurons, as many a philosopher believes? We are far from settling the issue not only regarding psychoanalysis but also every other psychic or cognitive science.” [Serge Moscovici, “Reflections and Reactions to the Credo of a True Believer.” New Ideas in Psychology. Volume 9, number 2, 1991. Pages 215-225.]

“Every experiment occurs within the context of an experience. The participants go into the laboratory as into a world inhabited by a vast array of puzzling symbols. To get their bearings there, they lean on their social representations and norms and impart to this world a meaning in agreement with them. This is reflected in their behaviour, judgments, and registered in the statistics. Everything occurs as if social representations, norms, constituted the context in which procedures, instructions, experimental material are inscribed as the elements of a text.” [Serge Moscovici, “Experiment and Experience: An Intermediate Step from Sherif to Asch.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 21, issue 3, June 1991. Pages 253-268.]

“I think it fitting to postulate first that theories, like beliefs of every kind, are representational. In other words, scientific theories are best defined as representations, and not as systems of axioms and logical sentences ….” [Serge Moscovici, “Toward a Social Psychology of Science.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 23, issue 4, 1993. Pages 343-374.]

“If we assume that reading conflicting articles is more effortful than reading supporting articles (because the former cannot be easily integrated into one’s prior representation of the decision problem), then a stronger confirmation bias in homogeneous groups should be the consequence.” [Stefan Schulz-Hardt, Dieter Frey, Carsten Lüthgens, and Serge Moscovici, “Biased Information Search in Group Decision Making.” Journal at Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 78, number 4, 2000. Pages 665-669.]

“Some representation seem to be principally based on knowledge that has been transmitted to and beliefs that have been inculcated in us …. For instance, my representations of how people act in order to escape violence in New York or Paris are built upon some impressive rules and images fashioned after my encounters.” [Serge Moscovici, “Social representations and pragmatic communication.” Social Science Information. Volume 33, number 2, 1994. Pages 163-177.]

“We are incapable of judging without prejudging, that is, without our sharing a representation that precedes experience and reflection and that derives its authority from tradition and thus makes communication possible.” [Juan A. Perez and Serge Moscovici, “Representations of Society and Prejudices.” Papers on Social Representations – Textes sur les Représentations Sociales. Volume 6, 1997. Pages 27-36.]

“For a start, I should say that I consider myself to be a modest researcher who has not created a grand system. I learned through my work in the history of science that it is better to be modest with respect to the destiny of one’s own work and, above all, not to assume that everything was in darkness before we came in and that, therefore, from now on we have the light. Of course, I am delighted, but also surprised, that the theory of social representations has been here for a long time and that new generations of researchers are interested in it, develop it and make a conceptual and methodological progress. I am pleased to see that new currents have emerged in the theory and that much diversity is expressed through the researchers’ personalities …. I am not against orthodoxies, but they never resist the test of the time.” [Serge Moscovici, “Presenting Social Representations: A Conversation.” Culture & Psychology. Volume 4, number 3, 1998. Pages 371-410.]

“… to the extent that the old political strategy of attaining transformations in the system as a whole has come to a dead end, a new, we might say, ethic-legal path is now being pursued to change people’s psychic and social representation, in order to improve human interactions and to readjust the system accordingly. In other words, being unable to modify the police, we are now attempting to modify policemen. We are neither denying the depth of these changes nor underestimating their social consequences. However, if they are genuine, we must envision victimized minorities and their strategy for action and for exerting influence in a new light.” [Serge Moscovici, “A study of minorities as victims.” European Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 37, 2007. Pages 725-746.]

“In Social Representation Theory it should be clear that ‘individuals or collectives to some extent see [social objects] as an extension of their behaviour and because, for them, it exists only because of the means and methods that allow them to understand [it]’ …. The construction of social objects by behaviour is an inherent part of Social Representation Theory: Behaviours define the social object relations, which are an inalienable part of the overarching representation, because ‘there is no definite break between the outside world and the world of the individual.’ Social objects exist by virtue of the concerted behaviour of subjects forming a social group, they are always located in the context of some activity and they are a part of action. Social Representation Theory’s insight into the meaning of cooperation among people and object relations has recently been taken up under the heading of ‘interobjectivity’ ….” [Wolfgang Wagner, “Commentary: Embodied Social Representation.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 1, 2017. Pages 25-31.]

“The involvement of the social sciences in social and collective representations studies is today impressive, particularly in anthropology and history …. On the one hand, we can observe in this literature a generalized use of the term representation; when the term is not mentioned as such we find descriptive categories for systems and processes of meaning whose conceptual frames are similar to those proposed in social representation approaches. On the other hand, the social sciences confer to representations related to practices and discourses specific functions such as: constitution of social reality and social orders; operator of political and social transformations; symbolic mediation sustaining social identity and the social bond; and modelling of sensibilities and practices in mass culture.” [Denise Jodelet, “Social Representations: The Beautiful Invention.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 38, issue 4, 2008. Pages 411-430.]

“Social Representations Theory … has been recognised to be compatible with the aims and practical undertakings of critical discourse studies …, whilst at the same time, discursive research has been recognised to be well suited for engagement within a social representations framework …. The current work capitalises on this reciprocity by utilizing Social Representations Theory (SRT) to interpret how and why the term ‘9/11’ operates as a significant representational tool within the construction of contemporary terrorism. The concern of this paper is not with studying discursive representations of ‘9/11’ where ‘9/11’ might implicitly or explicitly be approached as having some accessible ‘out there’ qualities, rather it examines the term ‘9/11’ as an active social psychological tool of representation.” [Laura Kilby, “Symbols of Terror: ‘9/11’ as the Word of the Thing and the Thing of the Word.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 2, 2015. Pages 229-249.]

“The theory of social representations, first formulated by Serge Moscovici, has influenced researchers from varying disciplines, but is still quite unknown to media researchers. The aim with this article is to introduce the theory and its communicative concepts and make them useful for media studies. The theory offers a new approach for studying how the media and citizens construct societal and political issues colouring our age, or some specific time period. Examples will be given from studies of climate change and the media ….” [Birgitta Höijer, “Social Representations Theory: A New Theory for Media Research.” Nordicom Review. Volume 32, number 2, 2011. Pages 3-16.]

“Social representations are widely communicated bodies of knowledge that are shared to a greater or lesser extent among various subgroups in society …. They include (but are not limited to) publicly elaborated arguments concerning issues of central importance to society …. Social representations thus reflect socially elaborated ways of thinking about and discussing an issue. Moscovici (1984, 1988) refers to the way a society builds linguistic repertoires, customs, and thinking around issues (like affirmative action) as ‘objectification.’ Objectified social representations provide society with culturally sanctioned repertoires for managing debate and building consensus. They are used to anchor new information so that most unfamiliar developments are absorbed (anchored) within familiar frameworks provided by existing social representations …. Social representations are similar to schemas … in their effects at the individual level, but the theory emphasizes the societal origins and effects of shared bodies of organized knowledge ….” [Chris G. Sibley, James H. Liu, and Steve Kirkwood, “Toward a Social Representations Theory of Attitude Change: The Effect of Message Framing on General and Specific Attitudes Toward Equality and Entitlement.” New Zealand Journal of Psychology. Volume 35, number 1, March 2006. Pages 3-13.]

“Social Representations order the material and social world—historically and symbolically significant—and provide individuals with a code for communicating with other individuals and groups.” [Annamaria Silvana de Rosa, “The ‘boomerang’ effect of radicalism in Discursive Psychology: A critical overview of the controversy with the Social Representations Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 36, issue 2, 2006. Pages 161-201.]

“… my present position [is] of believing there is an epistemological incompatibility between social representations and attitudes.” [Robert Farr, “Attitudes, social representations and social attitudes.” Papers on Social Representations – Textes sur les Représentations Sociales. Volume 3, number 1, 1994. Pages 30-33.]

“… if social representations are claimed to organise all our thinking, the concept will become vacuous, and, given what we know of the practices of mainstream experimental social psychologists, it will be rapidly trivialized. Widespread, socially significant systems of belief will be ignored in favour of laboratory studies of ‘dyadic social representations.’” [Colin Fraser, “Attitudes, Social Representations and Widespread Beliefs.” Papers on Social Representations – Textes sur les Représentations Sociales. Volume 3, number 1, 1994. Pages 1-13.]

“… a representation can convey information about that which it represents, information which could perhaps with trouble have been obtained by actually consulting the original.” [Rom Harré, “Some Reflections on the Concept of ‘Social Representation.’” Social Research. Volume 51, number 4, winter 1984. Pages 927-938.]

“This is the purpose of my paper: after giving a brief overview of the theory [of social representations], I shall discuss controversial aspects of the theory which should make it particularly appropriate for critical research. I shall illustrate this with examples from my own research on racialising representations in a stigmatised community … and racialising representations in the context of school exclusion … and some reference to central empirical work within the field …. While this demonstrates that social representations theory appears to have the conceptual tools to criticise the social order, there are few studies that have demonstrated this potential empirically.” [Caroline Howarth, “A social representation is not a quiet thing: exploring the critical potential of social representations theory.” British Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 45, number 1, 2006. Pages 65-86.]

“One fundamental hypothesis of [Serge] Moscovici’s … Social Representation Theory (SRT) is that most of our cognitive representations are fashioned in the course of everyday communication and not shaped beforehand and then selected and diffused, as is sometimes conceived in human sciences …. On this constructivist basis, Moscovici assumed that ordinary communication leads to the emergence of social representations (SRs), that is, collectively shared patterns of beliefs, values, and practices which evolve continuously over time and space.” [Pascal Huguet, Bibb Latané, and Martin Bourgeois, “The emergence of a social representation of human rights via interpersonal communication: empirical evidence for the convergence of two theories.” European Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 28, 1998. Pages 831-846.]

“… the issue for researchers working in the field of SR [social representations] was, from the outset, to create or adapt methodologies capable of revealing the structure and the internal organization of the representational field. With this objective, several methods and techniques have been developed. We will begin by presenting an overview of the different methods and discussing their advantages and limitations before concluding with an agenda for future research.” [Gregory Lo Monaco, Anthony Piermattéo, Patrick Rateau, and Jean Louis Tavani, “Methods for Studying the Structure of Social Representations: A Critical Review and Agenda for Future Research.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. October, 2016. Pages 1-26.]

“Social values are conveyed through particular viewpoints and play a part in ordering the social sphere in terms of what can legitimise and sustain collective identities. As part of the family of social representations, social values can affect individual choices while also being contested and collectively transformed. Intersecting with identification, they are ongoing processes of meaning-making that guide presentations of the self and action. Social values are continuously reformulated as individuals move through various contexts formulating multiple identities. The authors suggest that a better understanding of social values could proceed from distinguishing between value conceptions and implementations, and by considering how social values might intersect with identities.” [Rusten Menard, “Analysing Social Values in Identification; A Framework for Research on the Representation and Implementation of Values.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 2, 2015. Pages 122-142.]

“[Serge] Moscovici contributed greatly to the evolution of the theory of, and research in, social psychology. His work strongly supports the specific role of social psychology as a science, highlighting its links with other social science disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history of science, and history of culture.

“He was among the social psychologists who experienced personally the violence caused by the racial prejudice and the discrimination that characterised the twentieth century. While unique, his life has many points in common with the lives of European Jews during the Nazi nightmare that dominated Europe in the 1930s and 40s.”

[Augusto Palmonari, “Serge Moscovici.” European Bulletin of Social Psychology (special issue in honour of Serge Moscovici). Volume 27, number 1, May 2015. Pages 15-22.]

“Is the theory [of social representations] only appropriate for considering formerly scientific concepts that move into the realm of common sense? A review of studies using social representations theory proves that this is not the case, and that the theory can also be used to examine representations that do not necessarily stem from science, but do exist within common sense understanding ….” [Juliet L. H. Foster, “Representational Projects and Interacting Forms of Knowledge.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 33, issue 3, 2003. Pages 231-244.]

“The aim of the present research is to experimentally explore the impact of the invalidation of expectations on individuals’ commitment to a wastesorting program. In that perspective, we will also focus on the hierarchy that may exist among these expectations. Indeed, it is possible to consider that although some expectations could not be challenged without affecting individuals’ commitment, some other less essential expectations could be challenged without leading to such negative consequences. This question has important implications. Effectively, if transposed to other target behaviors such as waste reduction, energy saving, and water saving, it could be possible to identify the key expectations that a pro-environmental program must fulfill to avoid losing participants. It could also be possible to anticipate dropouts by identifying the factors that could impair individuals’ commitment. Nevertheless such a goal is based on the employment of a heuristic theoretical and methodological framework that can hierarchize expectations and draw hypotheses as to the impact of the invalidation of these expectations on participation. In that perspective, we will draw on the concept of social representation … and more precisely the structural approach to SRs [social representations] ….” [Anthony Piermattéo, Grégory Lo Monaco, and Fabien Girandola, “When Commitment Can Be Overturned: Anticipating Recycling Program Dropouts Through Social Representations.” Environment and Behavior. Volume 48, number 10, December 2016. Pages 1270-1291.]

“… [We can consider Serge] Moscovici’s … representation of psychoanalysis in popular culture. To follow Moscovici’s own recommendation, we should seek to understand this representation historically. This means we should reflect upon the origins of psychoanalysis and, in particular, examine what representations of the world were involved in these origins. As will be suggested, it is possible to find processes, which Moscovici located in the passage of psychoanalysis into commonsense, occurring within psychoanalysis before it entered popular culture. This has significance for Moscovici’s thesis about the relations between science and commonsense in contemporary society.” [Michael Billig, “Social Representations and Repression: Examining the First Formulations of Freud and Moscovici.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 38, issue 4, 2008. Pages 255-268.]

“In this paper we discuss various considerations on the nature of representations. With the human potential for reflexivity the distinction between the representation and the object emerges. It is the circumstances of life that determine whether this distinction is made, and what is made of it. We present a specification of the basic unit of analysis of social representation.…

“We propose an operational definition of a ‘social representation’ as the comparison of communication systems in four ways: the content structures, the typified processes of cultivation, the social-psychological functions, and the segmentation of social milieus.”

[Martin W. Bauer and George Gaskell, “Towards a Paradigm for Research on Social Representations.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 29, issue 2, 1999. Pages 163-186.]

“We review relevant aspects of cognitive science of religion, social representations theory,and frame theory, applying them to the analysis of CT [conspiracy theory] features. This generates a set of propositions about CTs that can be used to develop further empirical investigations. In what follows, we use specific terminology: CTs are propagated by sponsors who seek to spread sticky representations of events to a larger audience, often with the intent to frame them into action.” [Bradley Franks, Adrian Bangerter, and Martin W. Bauer, “Conspiracy theories as quasi-religious mentality: an integrated account from cognitive science, social representations theory, and frame theory.” Frontiers in Psychology. Volume 4, article 424, July 2013. Pages 1-12.]

“… the idea of social representation shows two things at the same time, it highlights the process of transformation as ideas move in society, and it also provides an integrative theory of communication for social psychology. The higher level of abstraction subsumes diffusion, vulgarisation, propagation, and propaganda as special case. This is a social psychological equivalent of relativity theory in physics which relegated traditional mechanics not to the dustbin of history, but as a special case of mass with low velocity and medium size.…

“For us four elements of social representations theory stand out; its framing of diversified common sense as creative resistance; its analysis of communication processes; its concern with science in society, and its methodology implications. We are convinced that this continues to be a progressive programme of research for social psychology.”

[Martin W. Bauer and George Gaskell, “Social Representations Theory: A Progressive Research Programme for Social Psychology.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 38, issue 4, 2008. Pages 335-353.]

“Conceptualised within the theory of social representations … the research presented here investigated what was understood by the social category of ‘Refugee’ and whether this understanding was mediated by the Refugee group’s place of origin.…

“Social representations theory delineates how meaning systems are constructed and used in wider social networks for broad communication within groups. As a networked system of concepts, ideas, beliefs and images, the structure of these constituent elements needs to be analysed if the function of the social representation (SR) is to be understood.”

[Scott Hanson-Easey and Gail Moloney, “Social representations of refugees: Place of origin as a delineating resource.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Volume 19, issue 6, November/December 2009. Pages 506-514.]

“… how do people think about their situation with regard to risk? What makes them take action towards risk, or, conversely, refrain from taking action towards it? Risk in general, and here seismic risk, cannot be reduced to a ‘situation’ to which individuals respond as information processing systems or as loci of emotions. The social representation of risk is inseparable to its elaboration as a social object through culture, communications of all kinds, and collective memory. The fact that the social representation of risk is anchored in a group’s culture and environment shows the necessity of the psychosocial approach in studies on collective risk.” [Andreea Gruev-Vintilaand Michel-Lois Rouquette, “Social Thinking about Collective Risk: How Do Risk-related Practice and Personal Involvement Impact Its Social Representations?” Journal of Risk Research. Volume 10, number 4, June 2007. Pages 55-581.]

“The theory of social representation offers a new approach for studying the meaning of ill-defined concepts in food science such as the concept of minerality in wine.… We hypothesize that wine descriptions might reflect the implicit imaginary and beliefs about wine characteristics and that the social representation perspective might provide a framework for understanding the thinking of wine professionals and wine consumers.” [Heber Rodrigues, Jordi Ballester, Maria Pilar Saenz-Navajas, and Dominique Valentin, “Structural approach of social representation: Application to the concept of wine minerality in experts and consumers.” Food Quality and Preference. Volume 46, December 2015. Pages 166-172.]

“… for a given stimulus to elicit a given response, a social representation must associate that particular stimulus with a particular response in an intelligible way for the human subject. To give an example, for somebody to call the police when hearing a gunshot, a social representation of law and order prohibiting the use of guns is required. In certain cultural contexts, or indeed in certain situations, a different social representation might be at play that would lead to a different behavioural outcome. For instance, one might respond very differently to hearing a gunshot at a military parade. The difference between the two situations that leads to an expected difference in behavioural responses is the intelligibility of the social situation from the respondent’s point of view. The social representations approach thus brings about a focus on meaning-making processes and the intelligibility of situations in understanding human psychological activity.” [Gordon Sammut, Eleni Andreouli, George Gaskell, and Jaan Valsiner, “Social representations: a revolutionary paradigm?” The Cambridge Handbook of Social Representations. Gordon Sammut, Eleni Andreouli, George Gaskell, and Jaan Valsiner, editors. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Pages 3-11.]

“Social representations are conceived as residing across rather than within individual minds, inhabiting the ‘between-space’ where individual and society connect ….

“The study of the body’s role in constituting psychological and social life has recently been revitalised by emerging research in the field of embodied cognition. SRT [social representations theory] dovetails with this literature in several conceptual and empirical preoccupations – for example, in the premise that affect and intergroup relations are formative influences on psychological life, and a concern with collapsing the duality of person/environment.… Expanding SRT’s field of analysis, such that it illuminates the interplay between embodied phenomenology and social communication in the development of common-sense knowledge, promises productive directions for empirical and theoretical advancement.”

[Cliodhna O’Connor, “Embodiment and the Construction of Social Knowledge: Towards an Integration of Embodiment and Social Representations Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 1, 2017. Pages 2-24.]

“It is the latter view – that dialogicality is central to thinking about the relationship between social representations theory and critical research practice – that this article expands upon in depth. Specifically, I argue that while researchers with a critical agenda (whether working within or outside of the theory of social representations) are often well-intentioned, the task of ‘giving voice’ only makes sense if considered within a dialogical epistemological framework. At the same time, dialogical epistemologies clearly present some serious challenges for so-called critical researchers, and may lead some to soften, if not altogether abandon, their claims to ‘giving voice.’ It is no coincidence that I was, until recently, one of the researchers so described, and my ideas in this paper are informed by my experience of conducting semi-structured interviews with single mothers in my doctoral research.” [Sophie Zadeh, “The implications of dialogicality for ‘giving voice’ in social representations research.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. February, 2017. Pages 1-16.]

“… we employ social representation theory (SRT) as the theoretical lens to gain a deep understanding on how citizens make sense of this new phenomenon of social media use in government …. Social representations are defined as the shared images and meanings through which people within a particular social group organize the world around them Thus, SRT should be a suitable theoretic lens to capture the nature of the phenomenon of social media use in government from the citizens’ perspective.

“Via a structural content analysis over the collected in-depth interviewing data from a group of Chinese citizens, a social representation map is generated to reflect the participants’ collective views on a full range of concepts … constituting the government microblogs phenomenon in China.”

[Baozhou Lu, Song Zhang, and Weiguo Fan, “Social Representations of Social Media Use in Government: An Analysis of Chinese Government Microblogging From Citizens’ Perspective.” Social Science Computer Review. Volume 34, number 4, August 2016. Pages 416-436.]

“This study explores representations of alcohol consumption during study abroad experiences for both male and female students and uses Social Representation Theory (SRT), a framework that has been successfully used to contextualise socially constructed concepts related to health behaviours and illness, to inform analyses and guide discussion.” [Giovanni Aresi, Francesco Fattori, Maura Pozzi, and Simon C. Moore, “I am going to make the most out of it! Italian university Credit Mobility Students’ social representations of alcohol use during study abroad experiences.” Journal of Health Psychology. OnlineFirst edition. September, 2016. Pages 1-10.]

“Some of the clearest statements of the theory of social representations, and the area of research which has arguably been most productive, have concerned the public’s representations of science. The guiding question of this research has been: ‘What happens to a scientific discipline when it passes from specialists into society?’ … [Serge] Moscovici’s first (and possibly most well-known) effort … dealt with the diffusion of psychoanalytic language into popular culture. Empirical observation confirmed that the use of scientific concepts was transformed once Freudian theory became socially-represented.” [John T. Jost, “Social representations and the philosophy of science: Belief in ontological realism as objectification.” Ongoing Production on Social Representations – Productions Vives sur les Représentations sociales. Volume 1, numbers 2–3, 1992. Pages 116-124.]

“During its long existence since the early 1960s, the theory of social representations (SRT) has not only led to theoretical advances in social psychology, but throughout its evolvement it has branched off into distinct approaches. This route has turned to be complicated partly due to diverse interpretations of Serge Moscovici’s rich and original ideas, and partly due to the effects from outside domains that were both attracted to, as well as critical of the theory.…

“In Moscovici’s original theory of social representations, ‘language and communication’ and ‘natural thinking’ are conceived as mutually interdependent capacities: ‘language and communication’ saturate the forms of ‘natural thinking’, and in turn, ‘natural thinking’ is communicative. Humans speak in and through diverse voices and therefore, both cognitive polyphasia and heteroglossia are concepts embedded in the original theory of social representations.

“These mutually interrelated capacities reveal themselves through interdependence of the Self and Others (the Ego-Alter) in relation to the Object of knowledge (the Ego-Alter-Object).”

[Ivana Marková, “‘Giving voice’: opening up new routes in the dialogicality of social change.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. June, 2017. Pages 1-7.]

“My approach can be summed up in two statements, from which a distinctive methodology flows. The first is: Societies are constituted of multiple overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power.…

“The second statement flows from the first. Conceiving of societies as multiple overlapping and intersecting power networks gives us the best available entry into the issue of what is ultimately ‘primary’ or ‘determining’ in societies. A general account of societies, their structure, and their history can best be given in terms of the interrelations of what I will call the four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP) relationships. These are (1) overlapping networks of social interaction, not dimensions, levels, or factors of a single social totality. This follows from my first statement. (2) They are also organizations, institutional means of attaining human goals. Their primacy comes not from the strength of human desires for ideological, economic, military, or political satisfaction but from the particular organizational means each possesses to attain human goals, whatever these may be. In this chapter I work gradually toward specifying the four organizational means and my IEMP model of organized power.”

[Michael Mann. The Sources of Social Power: Volume I—A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1986. Pages 1-2.]

“My IEMP model is not one of a social system, divided into four ‘subsystems,’ ‘levels,’ ‘dimensions,’ or any other of the geometric terms favored by social theorists. Rather, it forms an analytical point of entry for dealing with mess. The four power sources offer distinct, potentially powerful organizational means to humans pursuing their goals. But which means are chosen, and in which combinations, will depend on continuous interaction between what power configurations are historically given and what emerges within and among them. The sources of social power and the organizations embodying them are impure and ‘promiscuous.’ They weave in and out of one another in a complex interplay between institutionalized and emergent, interstitial forces.” [Michael Mann. The Sources of Social Power: Volume 2—The rise of classes and nation-states, 1760–1914. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Page 10.]

“Societies are not composed of autonomous levels or subsystems of a given socio-spatial network of interaction. Each has different boundaries and develops according to its own core internal logic. In major transitions, however, the interrelationships and very identities of organizations such as economies or states, are metamorphosed. So my IEMP model is not a social system; rather, it forms an analytical point of entry for dealing with messy real societies. The four power sources offer distinct organizational networks and means to humans pursuing their goals. The means chosen, and in which combinations, depends on interaction between the power configurations historically given and institutionalized and those that emerge interstitially within and between them. This is the main mechanism of social change in human societies: preventing any single power elite from clinging indefinitely onto power. Institutionalized power relations are being constantly surprised by the emergence of new interstitial power configurations. The sources of social power and the organizations embodying them are promiscuous – they weave in and out of each other in a complex interplay between institutionalized and emergent, interstitial forces.” [Michael Mann. The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3—Global empires and revolution, 1890–1945. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pages 15-16.]

[Michael Mann. The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4—Globalizations, 1945–2011. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2013. Pages 1-2.]

“To explain murderous ethnic cleansing, we need an overall model of the power interactions involved. I employ the model of the four sources of social power used in my previous historical work …. I study ethnic cleansing as the outcome of four interrelated sets of power networks, all of which are necessary to its accomplishment, but one of which can be regarded as causally primary.

“Ideological power refers to the mobilization of values, norms, and rituals in human societies.…

“Economic power is also important. All cases of cleansing involve material interests. Usually, members of an ethnic group come to believe they have a collective economic interest against an out-group.…

“Military power is socially organized, concentrated lethal violence. This proves decisive in the later stages of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing.

“Political power is centralized, territorial regulation of social life. I argue that violence escalates most over rival claims to political sovereignty …. My theses find support from the quantitative data of the Minorities at Risk project. The variables best explaining ethnopolitical rebellion in the world in the late 1990s were political protest over the preceding five years, an unstable, divided, but repressive regime, territorial population concentration, extensive political organization, and support from foreign sympathizers.”

[Michael Mann. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pages 30-33.]

“I originally designed this study of fascism as a single chapter in a general book about the twentieth century, the third volume of my The Sources of Social Power.” [Michael Mann. Fascists. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Page vii.]

“I have chosen not to here give the reader a heavy dose of sociological theory. But my own approach to fascism derives from a more general model of human societies that rejects the idealism-versus-materialism dualism. My earlier work identified four primary ‘sources of social power’ in human societies: ideological, economic, military, and political. Class theorists of fascism have tended to elevate economic power relations in their explanations, while nationalist theorists have emphasized ideology. Yet all four sources of social power are needed to explain most important social and historical outcomes. To attain their goals, social movements wield combinations of control over ultimate meaning systems (ideological), control over means of production and exchange (economic), control over organized physical violence (military), and control over centralized and territorial institutions of regulation (political). All four are necessary to explain fascism. Mass fascism was a response to the post–World War I ideological, economic, military, and political crises. Fascists proposed solutions to all four. Fascist organization also combined substantial ideological innovations (generally called ‘propaganda’), mass political electoralism, and paramilitary violence. All became highly ritualized so as to intensify emotional commitment. In attempting to seize power, fascist leaders also sought to neutralize economic, military, political, and ideological (especially church) elites. Thus any explanation of fascism must rest on the entwining of all four sources of social power, as my empirical case-study chapters demonstrate.” [Michael Mann. Fascists. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Page 5.]

“My original goal on beginning to work the project that became The Sources of Social Power was very ambitious. I would return to the classic sociological tradition of [Karl] Marx and [Max] Weber, developing grand theory on human societies in general from a firm empirical base. Since I intended, like them, to write about long-term macro-social change, I knew I would rely mainly on historical data. By that stage I had become an empirical sociologist investigating workers, factories, and labor markets.” [Michael Mann, “The Sources of My Sources.” Contemporary Sociology. Volume 42, number 4, July 2013. Pages 499-502.]

“I do not conceive of societies as systems but as multiple, overlapping networks of interaction, of which four networks – of ideological, economic, military and political power relations – are the most important. Geopolitical relations can be added to the four as a distinctive mix of military and political power, the mix varying between what are convention ally called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ geopolitics. Each of these four or five sources of power may have an internal logic or tendency of development, so that it might be possible, for example, to identify tendencies toward equilibrium, cycles, or contradictions within capitalism, just as one might identify comparable ten dencies within the other sources of social power.” [Michael Mann, “The end of capitalism?” Análise Social. Volume 48, number 209, 2013. Pages 927-945.]

“In the [first] two volumes of The Sources of Social Power, I argued that, in pursuit of their goals, human beings set up four main types of power organizations: ideological (or cultural, if you prefer); economic; military; and political. This model sees globalization as consisting of expansions of all four of these networks of interaction, each of which may have differing boundaries, rhythms and results, diffusing distinctive forms of integration and disintegration across the globe. Discussion of globalization should not neglect any of these. Recent events should bring this home, since they clearly involve a mixture of ideological, economic, military and political processes.” [Michael Mann, “Globalization and September 11.” New Left Review. Series II, number 12, November–December 2001. Pages 51-72.]

“It is worth asking why Armenians, rather than Greeks, Jews or Kurds took the brunt of the Turkish fury. The answers seem to be that Greeks and Jews were protected by foreign states—especially by the powerful German ally—while Kurds were seen as too ‘primitive’ to be really threatening, candidates for coerced assimilation, not murderous cleansing. In these respects, therefore, the Jewish ‘Final Solution’ was not unique, but the worst case of the sequence of genocides committed by modern organic nation-statism—begun in 1915.” [Michael Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing.” New Left Review. Series I, number 235, May–June 1999. Pages 18-45.]

“Luckily for socialists, religious conservatism had less power across northwest Europe. In Scandinavia, the more fervent Lutheran sects had tended to political liberalism, not conservatism. Britain was more agnostic, while in the Low Countries, Britain and the US, religious-political revivals would produce reaction amidst other faiths. Thus leftism stalled most across Catholic and Orthodox Europe.” [Michael Mann, “Sources of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Europe.” New Left Review. Series I, number 212, July–August 1995. Pages 14-54.]

“I defy him [John Hobson] to find any empirical analyses in the two published volumes of The Sources of Social Power, or for that matter in Fascists or The Dark Side of Democracy, where I significantly embrace Realism. In these works most states (or at least the more modern states, where we have better evidence) are depicted as factionalised, subject to many social pressures, and inhabiting a broader space in which both economic and ideological relations transcend state boundaries.

“Hobson is also wrong to say that in Sources my notion of a ‘multipower actor civilization’ (for example, Sumer or Christendom) merely concerns their ability to conduct diplomatic regulation among the constituent states. I deploy what I call the medieval ‘Christian ecumene’ mainly in its role of helping to regulate economic relations, reinforcing norms concerning market exchange and property rights and thus playing an important role in the development of capitalism. I also stress its role in legitimating peasant rebellions and generating heretical, socially rooted struggles.”

[Michael Mann, “Explaining International Relations, Empires and European Miracles: A Response.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 34, number 2, February 2006. Pages 541-550.]

“By 1800 the principal absolutists were Russia, Prussia and Austria. Their monarch’s formal despotic powers were largely unlimited. Citizenship was unknown. The rule of law supposedly operated, but personal liberties,and freedom of the press and association could be suspended arbitrarily. Indeed, any conception of universal rights was restrained by the proliferation of particularistic statuses, possessed by corporate groups – estates of the realm, corporations of burghers, lawyers, merchants and artisan guilds yet the real, infrastructural powers of the monarchs were far from absolute.” [Michael Mann, “Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship.” Sociology. Volume 21, number 3, August 1987. Pages 339-354.]

“The near-simultaneous appearance of Volumes III and IV of Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power concludes a truly grand project of historical sociology. Along with the work of Anthony Giddens, W. G. Runciman, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, Mann’s project was one of the distinctive products of the intellectual conjuncture of 1970s Britain. A colleague of Gellner’s at the LSE [London School of Economics], Mann was, like Giddens and Runciman, in search of a constructive exit from the impasse of post-Marxian, post-Weberian sociology. But his original formation was that of a quintessential ‘history boy’—a product of the legendary Manchester Grammar School–Oxford pipeline. In the course of an itinerary that took him from social work to engaged labour research, the original idea for Sources of Social Power took shape in the mid-1970s. Conceived as a short book, it grew into a massive undertaking.” [Adam Tooze, “Empires at War.” New Left Review. Series II, number 79, January–February 2013. Pages 129-139.]

“The cover of this fourth and (perhaps) final volume of Michael Mann’s vastly ambitious ‘history of power in human societies’ is a photograph of the earth taken from space. It is an obvious way of rendering pictorially the thematic of globalization, but oddly the image happens to feature the continent of Africa, about which there is next to nothing in the actual text. This absence is however not odd in Mann’s own terms. His historical sociology pursues not power in general but its ‘leading edge’ (he puts the term in quotation marks); and Africa is neither that edge nor a theatre where the leading edge, so to speak, stages its principal act. That part is played by the United States, the only world empire in history, and as such one of the globalizing forms, along with capitalism and the nation-state, into which power can be seen retrospectively to have crystallized during the period in question. ‘As it turned out’—the retrospective aspect—is essential to the proceedings.” [Anders Stephanson, “Empire Edgemanship.” New Left Review. Series II, number 91, January–February 2015. Pages 127-139.]

“The Dark Side of Democracy’s mass of historical evidence is marshalled to test a strikingly bold central thesis: that ethnic cleansing is the dark side of democracy, in the sense that the latter is premised on the creation of an ethnic community that ‘trumps’ or ‘displaces’ class divisions.” [Dylan Riley, “Democracy’s Graveyards?” New Left Review. Series II, number 48, November–December 2007. Pages 125-136.]

“His [Michael Mann’s] theory of societies as multiple, overlapping and intersecting power networks is too briefly and sketchily developed to stand up to close scrutiny. Concepts are developed as Weberian ‘ideal types’ and severely qualified and hedged, and this fits with the rejection of any attempt at general theory making the whole framework rather slippery and eclectic. The key theoretical ‘innovations’ that are claimed involve the identification of four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military and political which in good Weberian fashion interact through history in complex ways with no single one being dominant for too long.” [Paul Bagguley, “The Sources of Social Power (Vol. 1).” Review article. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 47, autumn 1987. Page 44.]

“[Michael] Mann openly declares his intention to provide a ‘sociology of movements,’ which manages to substitute classification for analysis.” [Harry Harootunian, “The future of fascism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 136, March/April 2006. Pages 23-33.]

“There is only one sociological methodology. Its core is not technique nor is it epistemology, nor is it substantive theory. It is what I have chosen to call the socio-logic chain.…

“Socio-logic is a habit of mind which pulls tightest the chain which links the two extremes of all research programmes an initial idea in the head and an eventual body of research data, created by the sociologist’s intervention in the world. It is a deliberately bastard term emphasizing the hybrid nature of sociology itself – a rigorous, ‘closed’ system of thought dealing with a messy ‘open’ society.…

[Michael Mann, “Socio-Logic.” Sociology. Volume 15, number 4, November 1981. Pages 544-550.]

“In Britain, attempts to construct a culture of enterprise have proceeded through the progressive enlargement of the territory of the market – the realm of private enterprise and economic rationality – by a series of redefinitions of its object. Thus, the task of creating an enterprise culture has involved the reconstruction of a wide range of institutions and activities along the lines of the commercial business organization, with attention focused, in particular, on its orientation towards ‘the sovereign consumer.’ At the same time, however, the market has also come to define the sort of relation an individual should have with him or herself, and the ‘habits of action’ he or she should acquire and exhibit. Enterprise refers here to the ‘kind of action or project’ that exhibits ‘enterprising’ qualities or characteristics on the part of individuals or groups. In this latter sense an enterprise culture is one in which certain enterprising qualities – such as self-reliance, personal responsibility, boldness and a willingness to take risks in the pursuit of goals – are regarded as human virtues and promoted as such.” [Paul du Gay. Consumption and Identity at Work. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1996. Page 56.]

“In this article we revisit [Paul du Gay’s] the theory of enterprise culture by exploring shifts in the popular business press and employee responses to them, in an effort to track the identity norms that have impinged on job seekers over time.…

“… Following [Michel] Foucault, du Gay contends that the exercise of organizational power and control now operates by institutionalizing discourses and practices that gain purchase on the employee identity …. Driving this trend, according to du Gay, is a blurring of the boundaries between previously distinct institutional domains such as production and consumption, bureaucracies and markets, or the economy and culture writ large.…

“… since there has been little effort to trace the broad trajectory of enterprise culture, we have no way of assessing its eventual capacity for predominance or hegemony.…

“Previous efforts to judge the applicability of enterprise theory empirically have been hobbled by their static and narrow coordinates, and by their failure to link employment discourse to the wider context of precarity that many workers now confront. The contribution of the present study, then, stems from its effort to re-open the enterprise debate, using data that can capture a broad swath of employment discourse over time, the logic that such discourse implies, and the ways that workers respond to its central messages. Approached in this way, we do indeed find evidence that conforms to at least some of the claims that enterprise theorists have made.”

[Steven P. Vallas and Emily R. Cummins, “Personal Branding and Identity Norms in the Popular Business Press: Enterprise Culture in an Age of Precarity.” Organization Studies. Volume 36, number 3, March 2015. Pages 293-319.]

“In the Vedanta [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, वेदांत, Vedāṃta], morality similarly follows from knowledge from the realisation that ‘That thou art.’ It is the most complete or transcendental affirmation of the self, the effacement of distinctions between self and all sentient creatures and all things which are here the goal of life, and morality becomes an episode in the establishment of the Unity.…

“Hindu ethics has its roots in philosophy and it is essentially disciplinary and practical in having before itself the goal of leading the self beyond the empirical to the transcendental.…

“… Says Asanga [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, आसंगा, Āsaṃgā]: ‘As there is no phenomenon separated from reality, so when describing ignorance, wise people are of opinion that it is intelligence itself.’ It is thus that the poles meet in transcendental idealism. What has been put eternally apart is eternally united. The immaterial, impalpable, transcendent heaven is made one and continuous with the gross and unhappy natural world. One is the other; the other the one. God is the world and transcends it; is the evil and the good which conquers and consumes that evil.’ God becomes MAN; the travails of men are the throes of the birth of gods.”

[Radhakamal Mukujee, “The Way of the Transcendentalist.” The Sociological Review. Volume a21, number 3, July 1929. Pages 197-232.]

“A few of their working-class forebears: the Florida educators who launched the first statewide teachers’ strike in 1968, seeking increased education funding and signaling an emerging militancy; the pioneering Chicago educators who, tired of crowded classrooms and crappy pay, formed the country’s first union composed entirely of teachers; the many workers who, in the early twentieth century, resisted the implementation of so-called ‘scientific management’ in their shops and factories. In each instance, workers fought dehumanization, indignity, and domination. They embodied the labor movement’s great promise, that workers acting in concert can control the terms, conditions, and material benefits of their labor.” [Shawn Gude, “The Industrial Classroom: In resisting standardized testing, today’s teachers are part of a rich tradition of struggle against dehumanization in the workplace.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 10, spring 2013. Pages 39-44.]

“The diversity of African politics does not preclude us from producing a systematic account of the process and nature of political development in Africa, seen as the product of interaction between externally imposed forms, the requirements and ambitions of successive dominant groups in African states, and pressures from below for – at the least – accountability, good government and political reform. In the account I have offered that interaction resulted in the appearance of a strictly limited number of forms of politics and associated political systems. At their first appearance some of these represented the capacity for innovation of African political elites, and others the recurring and irrepressible popular demand for democratic political systems. Almost all of these forms have now exhausted their potential, although some, like the centralised-bureaucratic form, are still in existence, and others – like the clientelist politics of the early 1960s – seem to have a made a brief reappearance in the early 1990s. If African states are to regain some of their autonomy, then there will have to be a second and more radical wave of innovation, this time directed at the production not of stable, authoritarian and centralised states, but towards stable, decentralised and democratic systems, at regional, national and subnational levels Western agencies and African leaders, who have been so thoroughly implicated in past failures, can provide neither guidance nor initiative in this process. Those are far more likely to come from within civil society, which already has experience of coping with the breakdown of centralised-bureaucratic systems, and of the far more difficult task of the reconstruction of civil and political life in the aftermath of terminal spoils politics.” [Chris Allen, “Understanding African Politics.” Review of African Political Economy. Volume 22, number 65, September 1995. Pages 301-320.]

“African politics in the nineties have been marked by a series of violent breakdowns of order, and in some cases the disappearance of the central state, in a large number of states. Attempts at the analysis of this phenomenon have involved several different but complementary approaches, notably those invoking globalisation, the economics of 'new' war, the crisis of the neopatrimonial state, or social and cultural factors as keys to explanation. These either confine themselves to case studies, or treat all instances of endemic violence as open to the same analysis, in part because they treat violence or warfare as themselves the central objects of analysis. An alternative approach does not see ‘war’ as the problem, but is instead concerned with the historical circumstances within which endemic violence occurs and which can be seen as possible causes of that violence.” [Chris Allen, “Warfare, Endemic Violence & State Collapse in Africa.” Review of African Political Economy. Volume 26, number 81, September 1999. Pages 367-384.]

“There … [has been a] trajectory to African politics—some states which professed to bend the logic of global capitalism in favor of more progressive outcomes: Ghana, Tanzania, and Mozambique, among others. The earliest of these attempts, most often instigated from the top down and more populist than socialist perhaps (‘African Socialism’), foundered in both developmental and democratic terms, although not in the longrun any more noticeably than did their African capitalist counterparts. Still, the absence of self-conscious class action from below, the administrative and ideological weaknesses of the leaderships, and the severe challenge of finding space for autonomous maneuver within the global economy proved intractable. Better sited, in Chris Allen’s view [as stated in the article, ‘Understanding African Politics’], were socialist attempts of more Marxist provenance that grew out of some of the liberation struggles in southern Africa, most notably in Mozambique.” [John S. Saul and Colin Leys, “Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 51, issue 3, July/August 1999. Pages 13-30.]

“The social form of people’s regular activities under capitalism is a response to a certain material and historical situation. The material and historical conditions explain the origin of the capitalist form, but do not explain why this form continues after the initial situation disappears. A concept of ‘cultural lag’ is not an explanation of the continuity of a social form after the disappearance of the initial conditions to which it responded. This concept is merely a name for the continuity of the social form. When the concept of ‘cultural lag’ parades as a name for a ‘social force’ which determines human activity, it is an obfuscation which presents the outcome of people’s activities as an external force beyond their control. This is not only true of a concept like ‘cultural lag.’ Many of the terms used by [Karl] Marx to describe people’s activities have been raised to the status of external and even ‘natural’ forces which determine people’s activity; thus concepts like ‘class struggle,’ ‘production relations’ and particularly ‘The Dialectic,’ play the same role in the theories of some ‘Marxists’ that ‘Original Sin,’ ‘Fate’ and ‘The Hand of Destiny’ played in the theories of medieval mystifiers.…

“By alienating their activity and embodying it in commodities, in material receptacles of human labor, people reproduce themselves and create Capital. From the standpoint of capitalist ideology, and particularly of academic Economics, this statement is untrue: commodities are ‘not the product of labor alone’; they are produced by the primordial ‘factors of production,’ Land, Labor and Capital, the capitalist Holy Trinity, and the main ‘factor’ is obviously the hero of the piece, Capital.

“The purpose of this superficial Trinity is not analysis, since analysis is not what these Experts are paid for. They are paid to obfuscate, to mask the social form of practical activity under capitalism, to veil the fact that producers reproduce themselves, their exploiters, as well as the instruments with which they’re exploited. The Trinity formula does not succeed in convincing. It is obvious that land is no more of a commodity producer than water, air, or the sun. Furthermore Capital, which is at once a name for a social relation between workers and capitalists, for the instruments of production owned by a capitalist, and for the money-equivalent of his instruments and ‘intangibles,’ does not produce anything more than the ejaculations shaped into publishable form by the academic Economists. Even the instruments of production which are the capital of one capitalist are primordial ‘factors of production’ only if one’s blinders limit his view to an isolated capitalist firm, since a view of the entire economy reveals that the capital of one capitalist is the material receptacle of the labor alienated to another capitalist. However, though the Trinity formula does not convince, it does accomplish the task of obfuscation by shifting the subject of the question: instead of asking why the activity of people under capitalism takes the form of wage-labor, potential analysts of capitalist daily life are transformed into academic house-Marxists who ask whether or not labor is the only ‘factor of production.’

“Thus Economics (and capitalist ideology in general) treats land, money, and the products of labor, as things which have the power to produce, to create value, to work for their owners, to transform the world. This is what Marx called the fetishism which characterizes people’s everyday conceptions, and which is raised to the level of dogma by Economics. For the economist, living people are things (‘factors of production’), and things live (money ‘works,’ Capital ‘produces’). The fetish worshipper attributes the product of his own activity to his fetish. As a result, he ceases to exert his own power (the power to transform nature, the power to determine the form and content of his daily life); he exerts only those ‘powers’ which he attributes to his fetish (the ‘power’ to buy commodities). In other words, the fetish worshipper emasculates himself and attributes virility to his fetish.

[Fredy Perlman. The Reproduction of Daily Life. Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 1969. Pages 3-6.]

“This paper offers a substantive discussion on the liberatory politic of Transformative Justice. Transformative Justice, as defined in this paper, is premised on the idea that individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive, and fundamentally intertwined—the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other. We believe that Transformative Justice presents us with a politic and model to heal the trauma of past violence, reduce the level of violence we experience, and mobilize masses of people.

“Transformative Justice is a response to the State’s inability to provide justice on either individual or collective levels. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a model that responds to experiences of violence without relying on current State systems. We believe this to be a liberating politic that creates opportunities for healing and transformation rather than retribution and punishment. Transformative Justice moves us toward equity and liberation rather than maintaining the inequality that the current State and systems maintain.

“The development of the Transformative Justice model is rooted in Generation FIVE’s substantive work on the personal and the political realities of child sexual abuse. One of the most intimate, stigmatized, and demonized forms of violence, child sexual abuse continues to be pervasive and persistent across nations, ‘race,’ class, religions, and cultures. For a variety of reasons, including the State’s inability to create solutions that families and communities will use, people rarely report child sexual abuse.

“When they do report, they do not get the justice, safety, or change they seek. In addition to the State’s inability to address the needs of those who have been sexually abused, future violence is not prevented due to the lack of opportunities for transformation of individuals, relationships, families, or communities. As a result of this and the lack of viable alternatives, rates of child sexual abuse remain epidemic.

“This paper focuses on ways to secure both individual and social justice in cases of child sexual abuse. We assert that Transformative Justice is a way not only to address incidents of abuse but also to prevent further abuse by working on the social conditions that perpetuate and are perpetuated by child sexual abuse. Transformative Justice is also about building the capacity of individuals and collectives to address larger conditions of inequality and injustice as well as to challenge State violence.”

[Sara Kershnar, Staci Haines, Gillian Harkins, Alan Greig, Cindy Wiesner, Mich Levy, Palak Shah, Mimi Kim and Jesse Carr. Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and other forms of Intimate and Community Violence—A Call to Action for the Left and the Sexual and Domestic Violence Sectors. Oakland, California: Generation FIVE. June, 2007. Page 1.]

“Unlike positions of moral relativism based on varying orientations in different cultures, it is proposed that moral development involves the construction of thinking in the moral domain through children’s reciprocal interactions with others. Along with the construction of moral reasoning based on understandings of welfare, justice, and rights, children construct judgments about conventions in the social system and areas of personal jurisdiction.…

“… children construct moral judgments about fairness, justice, rights, the need to avoid harming people and to help others. They also develop, through their experiences, concerns witthe suffering of others and with the inequalities between groups (including concerns with dominance and subordination in social hierarchies). Moral reasoning, therefore, is central in people’s social relationships ….”

[Elliot Turiel, “Moral reasoning, cultural practices, and social inequalities.” Innovación Educativa. Volume 12, number 59, May–August 2012. Pages 17-32.]

“In the work on age-related patterns of moral reasoning, we have looked at how children and adolescents above the age of 7 years reason about situations involving human welfare that vary in terms of whether they involve a conflict between the goals and needs of the self and those of another person, and the nature of the relationship the primary actor has with that other person. In sum, we looked at the nature of age-related shifts in children’s and adolescents’ tendency to coordinate elements involving moral decisions.” [Elliot Turiel, “Capturing the Complexity of Moral Development and Education.” Mind, Brain, and Education. Volume 3, issue 3, September 2009. Pages 151-159.]

“I wish to stress that it is not to argue for eclecticism or relativism. I do believe that researchers should take strong positions within a particular perspective, and that it is important to formulate coherent theoretical perspectives. These could emphasize evolution, culture, some coherent combination of the two, or other alternatives, such as a constructivism connected to the interaction of the individual with the environment. Nor do I mean to imply that researchers should not pursue topics that they deem important, such as those they label positive.” [Elliot Turiel, “Historical Lessons: The Value of Pluralism in Psychological Research.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Volume 50, number 4, October 2004. Pages 535-545.]

“Emotional appraisals are part of reasoning that involves taking into account the reactions of others and self …. The emotional reactions of people are a central part of moral judgments, and it is reciprocal interactions, along with reflections upon one’s own judgments and cultural practices or societal arrangements, that influence development …. Moral thinking is not a function of the internalization of social or cultural content.” [Elliot Turiel, “The Development of Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, and Personal Orders: More than a Sequence in Development.” Human Development. Volume 51, number 1, February 2008. Pages 21-39.]

“… [I am] a social scientist conducting research on children’s moral development (and other related topics) and theorizing on topics like moral reasoning, moral conduct, culture, and education …. I consider myself a nonrelativist with regard to morality, but find that many laypersons take relativistic positions and frequently express surprise that I view it otherwise.” [Elliot Turiel, “Making Sense of Social Experiences and Moral Judgements.” Criminal Justice Ethics. Volume 13, issue 2, summer/fall 1994. Pages 69-76.]

“The moral imperatives asserted by cultural relativists—that cultures should be accorded tolerance, freedom, and equality—become relevant here. It has been noted that … moral imperatives constitute an internal contradition within the relativistic position. Perhaps more important, if it is the case that within cultures not all is uniform, that greater rights and privileges are accorded to some groups than others, and that there are different perspectives, then it would follow that, at a minimum, the moral considerations said to apply to different cultural groups would also apply to different groups within cultures. Different groups of people, defined by social structural categories in the social hierarchy (for example, females and males, lower classes or castes and higher classes or castes) may represent different interests and goals. Insofar as conflicts and contested understandings exist, the issues of tolerance, freedom, and equality may be applicable.” [Elliot Turiel, “Conflict, Social Development, and Cultural Change.” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Volume 61, issue 83, spring 1999. Pages 77-92.]

“[Elliot] Turiel and I disagree about many things: about whether there is a single true natural moral law, or whether there are several; about whether natural law is epistemic (dependent on our conceptual choices); about whether moral law extends beyond issues of harm, rights, and justice. I subscribe to the view (and Turiel does not) that there is more than one true natural moral law, that natural law is ‘epistemic,’ and that moral law extends beyond issues of harm, rights, and justice.” [Richard A. Shweder, “In Defense of Moral Realism: Reply to Gabennesch.” Child Development. Volume 61, number 6, December 1990. Pages 2060-2067.]

“Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support cheaters, slackers, and irresponsible fools). But Republicans since [Richard] Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and military virtues) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions). And after they embraced Christian conservatives during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and became the party of ‘family values,’ Republicans inherited a powerful network of Christian ideas about sanctity and sexuality that allowed them to portray Democrats as the party of Sodom and Gomorrah.” [Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2012. Page 180.]

“Moral Foundations Theory proposes that the human mind is organized in advance of experience so that it is prepared to learn values, norms, and behaviors related to a diverse set of recurrent adaptive social problems …. We think of this innate organization as being implemented by sets of related modules which work together to guide and constrain responses to each particular problem. But you don’t have to embrace modularity, or any particular view of the brain, to embrace MFT. You only need to accept that there is a first draft of the moral mind, organized in advance of experience by the adaptive pressures of our unique evolutionary history.” [Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl, Ravi Iyer, Sean P. Wojcik, and Peter H. Ditto, “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 47. Patricia Devine and Ashby Plant, editors. San Diego, California: Academic Press imprint of Elsevier. 2013. Pages 55-130.]

“According to the social intuitionism model, moral judgment is an intuitive process, characterized by automatic, affective reactions to stimuli. Moral foundations theory builds on this model, categorizing our moral intuitions into ‘foundations.’ … These foundations concern dislike for the suffering of others (Care/harm), proportional fairness (Fairness/cheating), group loyalty (Loyalty/betrayal), deference to authority and tradition (Authority/subversion), and concerns with purity and contamination (Sanctity/degradation). Researchers have recently proposed a sixth foundation (Liberty/oppression), focusing on concerns about domination and coercion ….” [Scott Clifford, Vijeth Iyengar, Roberto Cabeza, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral foundations vignettes: a standardized stimulus database of scenarios based on moral foundations theory Behavior Research Methods. Volume 47, issue 4, December 2015. Pages 1178-1198.]

“… [One] key tenet of Moral Foundations Theory is that the postulated foundations have a universal evolutionary basis, forming a ‘first draft’ of a person’s moral ‘taste buds,’ which is organized prior to experience but also, to some extent, modifiable by experience; it was originally based partly upon reviews of research on morality across cultures, from an anthropological perspective, and on phylogenetic precursors of human morality in primates, from an evolutionary perspective …. The presumed universality of the moral foundations implies that it is crucial to investigate the extent to which the hypothesized factorial structure and relation to political ideology can be recovered in different cultures and languages.” [Artur Nilsson and Arvid Erlandsson, “The Moral Foundations taxonomy: Structural validity and relation to political ideology in Sweden.” Personality and Individual Differences. Volume 76, April 2015. Pages 28-32.]

“[Jonathan] Haidt argues for five psychological foundations of morality: He includes harm and fairness and adds loyalty, respect for authority, and spiritual purity …. Other scholars have proposed lists of universal aspects of morality, and Haidt identified his five by trying to work out what they all had in common. He hypothesizes that all five exist in every culture but are emphasized to varying degrees.” [Greg Miller, “The Roots of Morality: Neurobiologists, philosophers, psychologists, and legal scholars are probing the nature of human morality using a variety of experimental techniques and moral challenges.” Science. Volume 320, May 9th, 2008. Pages 734-737.]

“Briefly, intuitions based on the Harm [moral] foundation are activated by signs of pain and suffering and might lead us to condemn acts and individuals that cause suffering and to admire those who alleviate or prevent harm …. The Fairness foundation is activated by perceiving violations of reciprocity, equality, individual rights, and justice. The Ingroup foundation arises from our sense of attachment and obligation to groups that we identify with …—we approve of those who sacrifice for the group … or those who contribute to its cohesion and well-being. The Authority foundation stems from our long history of living within social hierarchies; it underlies intuitions that favor those who show leadership, wisdom, respect, or deference and to disapprove of those who fail to fulfill their duties. Finally, Purity foundation engenders concerns about sanctity and desecration and physical and spiritual corruption, such as the inability to control one’s base impulses. It also underlies our tendency to imbue entities (God, nature) with sacred meaning.” [Spassena Koleva, Dylan Selterman, Ravi Iyer, Peter Ditto, and Jesse Graham, “The Moral Compass of Insecurity: Anxious and Avoidant Attachment Predict Moral Judgment.” Social Psychological and Personality Science. Volume 5, number 2, 2014. Pages 185-194.]

“According to the MFT [Moral Foundations Theory], the five foundations are universally present, and any combination of them can be used to support an ideological narrative, including those that motivate violence …. This allows subcultures within the same society to elaborate and emphasize different foundations to differing degrees. So, the connection between sacredness and IPV [intimate partner violence] could come down to a question of the intensity of some specific moral concerns.” [María L. Vecina, “The Five Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale in men in court-mandated treatment for violently abusing their partners.” Personality and Individual Differences. Volume 64, July 2014. Pages 46-51.]

“Moral foundations theorists sometimes suggest that they are offering a purely descriptive theory about what people believe is moral (rather than what actually is moral), but their frequent use of terms such as ‘virtues,’ ‘moral truths,’ ‘moral worth,’ and ‘moral knowledge’ clearly implies normative, prescriptive conclusions …. Moral foundations theorists commonly chastise liberals for failing to understand or appreciate conservative moral motivations; there is even said to be a ‘‘moral color-blindedness’ of the left’ ….” Matthew Kugler, John T. Jost, and Sharareh Noorbaloochi, “Another Look at Moral Foundations Theory: Do Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation Explain Liberal-Conservative Differences in ‘Moral’ Intuitions?” Social Justice Research. Volume 27, issue 4, December 2014. Pages 413-431.]

“The Moral Foundations Questionnaire … uses abstract relevance assessments and more contextualized moral judgments to measure individual reliance on each of the foundations. The Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale … assesses how ‘sacred’ individuals find each of the domains by asking how much money it would take for them to commit an act that violates principles of the domain.” [Andrea L. Glenn, Ravi Iyer, Jesse Graham, Spassena Koleva, and Jonathan Haidt, “Are All Types of Morality Compromised in Psychopathy?” Journal of Personality Disorders. Volume 23, number 4, August 2009. Pages 384-398.]

“Recent work using Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory (MFT) offers … [a] perspective [on morality and politics]. [Spassena] Koleva et al. … argued that political differences could best be explained by attention to five innate psychological systems (or ‘foundations’) centered on harm/harm, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Although these systems are present in all individuals, different cultures emphasize different foundations, leading to a wide variety of moral systems. These systems, in turn, shape political views, with liberals primarily emphasizing harm and fairness, but conservatives valuing all five foundations more equally ….” [Andrew Miles and Stephen Vaisey, “Morality and politics: Comparing alternate theories.” Social Science Research. Volume 53, September 2015. Pages 252-269.]

“… relative favorability toward [Barack] Obama was significantly related to endorsing the Fairness [moral] foundation, while relative favorability toward [Hillary] Clinton was significantly related to endorsing the moral values of Ingroup and Authority. While the effect sizes are small, they show that the moral foundations retain predictive validity for this candidate choice even when controlling for age, gender, education, and political orientation. Clinton supporters appear to be more morally conservative, showing greater endorsement of group-oriented moral concerns, though they identify themselves as being just as strongly liberal. Relative preference for Clinton appears to be related to being a good group member, favoring tradition, and supporting the social order, while relative preference for Obama appears to be related to endorsing moral foundations related to treating individuals well.” [Ravi Iyer, Jesse Graham, Spassena Koleva, Peter Ditto, and Jonathan Haidt, “Beyond Identity Politics: Moral Psychology and the 2008 Democratic Primary.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. Volume 10, number 1, December 2010. Pages 293-306.]

“The MFQ [Moral Foundations Questionnaire] fills the need for a theoretically grounded scale covering the full range of human moral concerns. We found substantial evidence that the scale is reliable and valid. The scale is internally consistent (both within and between two question formats) while maintaining conceptual coverage of diverse manifestations of foundation-related concerns. Test–retest analyses showed stability of foundation subscale scores over time. External validations of the MFQ using widely used scales, as well as attitudes toward conceptually related social groups, showed convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.” [Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H. Ditto, “Mapping the Moral Domain.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 101, number 2, August 2011. Pages 366-385.]

“Western societies are growing more diverse, and with diversity comes differing ideals about how best to regulate selfishness and about how we ought to live together. Participants in political debates are motivated in part by moral convictions. Moral foundations theory offers a useful way to conceptualize and measure such convictions. As research on political psychology thrives …, we hope that it will clarify the role that morality plays in political thought and behavior.” [Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 96, number 5, May 2009. Pages 1029-1046.]

“MFT [moral foundations theory] was originally designed to analyze cultures, not individuals. It was not intended to be a trait theory, or a theory about political ideology. Rather, it was created by two psychologists … who had worked with the anthropologist Richard Shweder on questions of morality and culture …. We were … delighted by the variability of moral practices we read about in ethnographies.… [W]e … recognized that the psyche was not a blank slate; it contained certain tools or building blocks, provided by evolution, which constrained and enabled the two-way co-construction of culture and psyche.” [Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and Craig Joseph, “Above and Below Left–Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations.” Psychological Inquiry. Volume 20, issue 2, August 2009. Pages 110-119.]

“Importantly, research using this model [Moral Foundations Theory] has demonstrated that the relative importance of these domains varies between liberals and conservatives. In particular, liberals tend to be more concerned about compassion and justice, whereas conservatives are more concerned about ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Differences in the strength of these underlying motivational systems are thought to influence explicit political attitudes and ideologies.” [Jacob B. Hirsh, Colin G. DeYoung, Xiaowen Xu, and Jordan B. Peterson, “Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Volume 36, number 5, 2010. Pages 655-664.]

“We propose that human beings come equipped with an intuitive ethics, an innate preparedness to feel flashes of approval or disapproval toward certain patterns of events involving other human beings. The four patterns for which we believe the evidence is best are those surrounding suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. These intuitions under-gird the moral systems that cultures develop, including their understandings of virtues and character. By recognizing that cultures build incommensurable moralities on top of a foundation of shared intuitions, we can develop new approaches to moral education and to the moral conflicts that divide our diverse society.” [Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “Intuitive ethics: how innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues.” Dædalus. Volume 133, number 4, fall 2004. Pages 55-66.]

“[Jonathan] Haidt’s aim is to suggest a model for understanding plurality. However, pluralism/plurality is a label that one can stick on diverse phenomena in the field of morality and ethics. First, there is the pluralism of moralities, moral systems or moral traditions——whatever term is preferred. Since moralities are a part of, and embedded in, more encompassing cultures, moral pluralism is connected to cultural pluralism. Most societies are multicultural and therefore also morally pluralist. Haidt is quite aware of such pluralism. Second, within the plurality of moralities he makes a distinction between different types of ethics: the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community and the ethic of divinity …. Haidt also mentions a third type of pluralism: the plurality of moral foundations (or moral modules or moral sense receptors).” [Bert Musschenga, “The promises of moral foundations theory.” Journal of Moral Education. Volume 42, number 3, September 2013. Pages 330-345.]

“In contrast to these readings of securitization dynamics [traditional securitization theory from a structurationist perspective], scholars of a second generation of securitization theory post-Copenhagen typically argue that the authority of a speaker is unlikely to be perfectly consolidated and secured, so that it is often necessary to consider and theorize more complex processes of authorization within discourse. Relatedly, in sociolinguistic terms, scholars post-Copenhagen often argue that the performative power of a speech act cannot be captured only in the abstract and in the form of a single linguistic act, but needs to be contextually located within broader structures and relational sequences of meaning and power, that is, both synchronically and diachronically. In other words, speech acts need to be related to and analysed within the context of specific social settings and textual fields, as well as broader historical sequences and continuities.” [Holger Stritzel. Security in Translation: Securitization Theory and the Localization of Threat. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2014. Page 46.]

“… the aim of this article is to make transparent the main tensions and boundaries of securitization theory and to suggest an alternative that is more systematic and clearer. With a clearer framework, communication between scholars would be improved and insights from ‘real-world’ securitizations could be gathered and compared. This, in turn, could help improve the theoretical reflection and conceptual restructuring towards a theory of securitization. In this sense, even a mere conceptual critique and an alternative framework would be of help, given the problematic range of contradictory empirical applications of securitization theory we have experienced so far.” [Holger Stritzel, “Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond.” European Journal of International Relations. Volume 13, number 3, 2007. Pages 357-383.]

“This article suggests a way of analysing the entanglements of organized crime by drawing on securitization theory. Yet, while the concept of securitization can be utilized to study these entanglements in principle, the theory suffers from the lack of both a broader social theory of discourse and a more specific theorization of sociopolitical processes. By providing these theorizations, this article develops a specific methodology for studying securitizing moves in relation to intertextual linkages with pop culture and the power politics of intertextuality, which will be illustrated with references to translations of organized crime in early US security discourse.” [Holger Stritzel, “Securitization, power, intertextuality: Discourse theory and the translations of organized crime.” Security Dialogue. Volume 43, number 6, 2012. Pages 549-567.]

“Overall, my argument relates the reflections of this article to discursive approaches in security studies and in particular to the concept of securitisation which provides the by far most elaborate – and prominent – understanding of how threats/ threat discourses are produced in world politics. These perspectives do not deny ‘reality’ but claim that we do not have exclusive access to this reality without interpretation and giving what we perceive (or others claim) to be true a ‘name,’ which in turn has significant cognitive and social effects. Giving a case or development a ‘name’ therefore isn’t trivial.” [Holger Stritzel, “Security as translation: threats, discourse, and the politics of localisation.” Review of International Studies. Volume 37, number 5, December 2011. Pages 2491-2517.]

“The alternative model that we are here proposing … runs as follows.… [S]ecuritization theory is unable to provide a fully satisfactory analysis of revolutionary ontology because it posits an ontological separation where revolutions posit an ontological identification.… [T]he ontological identification that revolutions presuppose depends on the idea of self-sacrifice: it is the fact that people are willing to die that renders them revolutionary, and this is the premise upon which the ontological identification of revolutionary states and revolutionary subjects is built. This, then, would suggest an alternative ‘move’ of securitization. What if one were to define revolutionary securitization as the move by which the dualism of liberal ontology – state vs. subject – is collapsed into itself, so as to yield the kinds of totalizing politics revolutionary states such as Cuba take for granted? On such a view, the act of armed revolution against the reigning powers effectively takes the role of a primordial act of political cosmogony, as it were. The people take arms, not just to usurp state power, but, through the self-sacrificial logic of revolution, to render themselves ontological coterminous with it, thus giving birth, effectively, to a new political universe.” [Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, “Revolutionary securitization: an anthropological extension of securitization theory.” International Theory. Volume 4, number 2, 2012. Pages 165-197.]

“Our efforts have been directed towards identifying the manner in which the structural characteristics of different groups affect the actor’s perceptions of the types of freedom. The relationship between types of freedom and feelings of deprivation of freedom has also been examined. We have attempted, in short, to develop operational definitions of freedom that allow us to specify in a more concrete and grounded manner the way in which the concept varies in relation to other variables.

“At the basis of this study is the relationship between the type of freedom and deprivation of freedom. The impact of group structure on freedom can be best seen in this relationship. We will discuss the various associations in terms of the meaning that we attribute to them through understanding the difference in the group structures.

“Among these groups, the monasteries and the sorority are unique in requiring probationary periods and initiation ceremonies. This is probably the reason that these groups have the highest negative correlation between freedom as discipline and deprivation of freedom and the highest positive correlations between conditional freedom and deprivation of freedom. In other words, these people feel that whatever the deprivations imposed by life in their groups, they are lessened appreciably by the higher amount of personal discipline expected and syrmbolized by the initiation ceremony. As studies in anthropology have shown, the probation period indicates the reciprocal relationship of person and group. It modifies the impact of the structural relationship between the individual and the collectivity. In this sense, the notion of freedom as discipline is a compromise between the group’s freedom to control the actor and the egoistic type of freedom.”

[George A. Hillery, Jr., Charles J. Dudley, and Paula C. Morrow, “Toward a Sociology of Freedom.” Social Forces. Volume 55, number 3. March 1977. Pages 685-700.]

“We wish to make the following theoretical contribution to the sociological understanding of justice. In line with the discussion of rationality above, we dispense with the notion that justice can be a template according to which deliberative outcomes could be measured for fit. Instead we explicate the use of ‘justice’ as part of the temporally situated, in- course, commonsense, lively, and contingent determinations of jury members. In keeping with the development of ethnomethodological theory, our investigation contains a heavy ‘empirical’ component; if the intelligible features of society are produced locally through methods that are reflexive to real society, then theoretical analysis of members’ achievements cannot be predicated through a priori means or deductive reasoning …. Ethnomethodological theory necessarily involves discovering, in the details of endlessly contingent member-produced actions, evidence of phenomena that are real in terms of members’ ongoing accounting practices ….” [Douglas W. Maynard and John F. Manzo, “On the Sociology of Justice: Theoretical Notes from an Actual Jury Deliberation.” Sociological Theory. Volume 11, number 2, July 1993. Pages 171-193.]

“This article investigates how codes and signals were employed in avant-garde poetry and art in the 1960s, and how such attempts were performed in the wake of cybernetics and (partly) through the use of new media technologies, such as the tape recorder and the computer. This poetry—as exemplified here by works by Åke Hodell, Peter Weibel, and Henri Chopin—not only employed new materials, media, and methods for the production of poems; it also transformed the interface of literature and the act of reading through immersion in sound, through the activation of different cognitive modes, and through an intersensorial address. On the one hand, this literary and artistic output can be seen as a response to the increasing intermedation (in Katherine Hayles’s sense) in culture and society during the last century. On the other hand, we might, as contemporary readers, return to these poetic works in order to use them as media archaeological tools that might shed light on the aesthetic transformations taking place within new media today.…

“Here I want … to … return to the electronic and cybernetic era … in order to trace a poetics and poetic practice engaged in a displacement of literature’s alphabetic bias and a transformation of the interface as well as the reading of literature through the elaboration of codes and signals. The field of post-alphabetic writing that was mapped out during the postwar decades through the emergence of new technologies, disciplines, and tendencies in science—television, computers, tape recorders, cybernetics, informatics, molecular biology, and so on—was also a place that attracted artists and poets to imagine and construct alternative modes of production and reception.”

[Jesper Olsson, “Connect and immerse: a poetry of codes and signals.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. Volume 4, 2012. No pagination.]

“Manifest landmarks in theory transfigure when the foundational underplate that makes their very existence possible shifts upward. Methodology of the Oppressed follows this theory uprising—this ascendance of the latent force that once had inspired, energized, and made possible the U.S. intellectual geography of the late twentieth century. What surfaces is the forgotten, an underlayer of oppositional consciousness that quietly influenced the history of U.S.-Euro consciousness throughout the twentieth century. Exposed is a rhetoric of resistance, an apparatus for countering neocolonizing postmodern global formations. Here, this apparatus is represented as first, a theory and method of oppositional consciousness: the equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist, separatist, and differential modes; second, as a methodology of the oppressed (which cuts through grammars of supremacy), and which over the course of the book transforms into a methodology of emancipation comprised of five skills: semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics, and differential consciousness; and finally, the book argues that these different methods, when utilized together, constitute a singular apparatus that is necessary for forging twenty-first-century modes of decolonizing globalization. That apparatus is ‘love,’ understood as a technology for social transformation.” [Chela Sandoval. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 2000. Pages 1-2.]

“Through the Center for Courage & Renewal we offer personal and professional retreats and programs designed to explore vocational and life questions, offer renewal and encouragement, and deepen engagement in professional practice. Using what we call the Circle of Trust® approach, we invite groups into a communal process based upon a set of principles and practices through which we engage our deepest questions in a way that welcomes our inwardness even as it connects us to the gifts and challenges of community and to the larger world.

“To date the majority of our participants have come from K–12 and higher education settings. And although conducting our retreats is not the same as creating learning spaces for academic subjects, through these participants we have seen evidence of how elements of the Circle of Trust® approach have broad applicability to many kinds of pedagogical settings. Indeed, participants in our circles eagerly take these practices back into their classrooms and workplaces, having found them to be powerful in their own lives.”

[Terry Chadsey and Marcy Jackson, “Principles and Practices of the Circle of Trust® Approach.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Volume 2012, issue 130, summer 2012. Pages 3-14.]

“The Circle of Trust® Approach assumes that the exploration of any complex issue requires an inner examination of one’s values, beliefs, and ways of being in the world. A few key principles underlie this approach. They include that this inner journeying requires both solitude and community; that there is profound utility in exploring paradox; and that there is a hidden wholeness available despite the brokenness we experience in the world.

“Inner Work Requires Solitude and Community. In Circles of Trust®, we make space for the solitude that allows us to learn from within, while supporting that solitude with the resources of community. Participants take an inner journey in community where we learn how to evoke and challenge each other without being judgmental, directive, or invasive.”

[Sherry K. Watt, Margaret Golden, Lisa A. P. Schumacher, and Luis S. Moreno, “Courage in Multicultural Initiatives.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Volume 2013, issue 114, winter 2013. Pages 57-68.]

“Educators based at the University of Mississippi, community-based educators, social justice advocates, and funders collaborated to provide the resources and opportunities for diverse groups of Mississippians to participate in the Circle of Trust® approach as a vehicle for community healing and transformation. Created by educator and public intellectual Parker J. Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal (www.couragerenewal.org), this approach is a retreat-based learning format founded on a set of principles and practices that honor the cultivation of one’s own wisdom and voice and evoke the courage to integrate the inner life with the active life of service and leadership. The theory of change behind the Circle of Trust® approach is that individual hearts and minds must open to new possibilities if external systems and structures are going to shift.” [Bonnie Allen and Estrus Tucker, “Circles of Learning in Mississippi: Community Recovery and Democracy Building.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Volume 2012, issue 130, summer 2012. Pages 89-100.]

“Although the questionnaire revealed that respondents are overwhelmingly positive about their Circle of Trust experience, it is important to note that some also mentioned minor ways in which their experience could be improved (the most common suggestion was to make the retreats longer!). The majority of respondents, though, said that they could not think of anything that could be done to improve their Circle of Trust experience.” [Janet Smith, “Measuring the Impact of the Circle of Trust® Approach.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Volume 2012, issue 130, summer 2012. Pages 101-111.]

“Circles of Trust offer ample opportunity for facilitators to model and teach honest open questions—and for participants to practice this form of questioning that intentionally goes against the grain of advice giving. These questions inform the participants’ discussion of how ‘third things’—typically poems, other short pieces of literature, music, or visual art—intersect with their personal and professional lives. Journaling prompts or suggestions are also typically honest open questions, and participants learn to use their own gentle questions to invite small-group partners into deeper sharing— not to satisfy the asker’s curiosity but to serve the answerer’s further inner exploration. In clearness committees, the heart of every retreat, the honest open questions of a small group also invite a focus person to think deeply into a concern shared in the strictest confidence.” [Christine T. Love, “Dialing In to a Circle of Trust: A ‘Medium’ Tech Experiment and Poetic Evaluation.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Volume 2012, issue 130, summer 2012. Pages 37-52.]

“This section describes ways in which I have actively incorporated the Circle of Trust® approach into five classes I currently teach in the counseling psychology program.

“The strategies I identify are not new. New applications invite old practices forward to assist budding counselors in reconnecting with their own developmental story, their hopes, dreams, and fears. The Circle of Trust® approach facilitates reflection of the self and the self in relationship to others. There is invitation to the counselor to integrate soul and new role.”

[Judith A. Goodell, “The Circle of Trust® Approach and a Counselor Training Program: A Hand in Glove Fit.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Volume 2012, issue 130, summer 2012. Pages 27-35.]

“A key aspect of any Courage & Renewal program is the use of the Circle of Trust approach. Core to this approach is the use of a number of ‘Touchstones’ that help to define clear boundaries that help create safe space for the soul.

“While these touchstones define how we relate to each other in a circle of trust, they can also be adapted to define how you work together in your organisation, community or network with integrity and trust — inviting the best of each person to show up and contribute.”

[Editor, “Circle of Trust Touchstones.” Courage & Renewal Australasia: eNews. Number 2, 2016. Pages 1-2.]

“Fortunately, [Alexis de] Tocqueville had a positive experience with … [a] religious group whose mode of worship was quite different from both evangelicals and Catholics: the Quakers of Philadelphia. The Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers are formally known, ‘had long encouraged cooperation in public affairs as well as toleration in religion” and were actively involved in various forms of relief work and associational life. Tocqueville’s appreciation of Quakerism—perhaps because the gravitas of the Quaker silent meeting for worship met his standards of religious formality—gave him his first insight into what would become a major theme of his work: the importance of voluntary associations in forming democratic habits of the heart.” [Parker J. Palmer. Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 2011. Page 121.]

“This Leader’s Guide has been created as a resource to provide all you need for reflecting on The Active Life in a group study context. However, this doesn’t mean that you and the group must accomplish or discuss everything it suggests. You may find that you don’t have time for all the questions listed. Use your judgment, and the group’s expressed preferences, to select those questions you want to focus on—perhaps at the opening of each session, as this Guide occasionally prompts you to do.” [Parker Palmer. The Active Life Leader’s Guide: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2011. Kindle Edition.]

“I ran across the old Quaker saying, ‘Let your life speak.’ I found those words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: ‘Let the highest truths and values ues guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything thing you do.’ Because I had heroes at the time who seemed to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning ing for me-it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, a life of high purpose.

“So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, able, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self—as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a ‘noble’ way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.”

[Parker J. Palmer. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 2000. Kindle edition.]

“Spaces designed to welcome the soul and support the inner journey ney are rare. But the principles and practices that shape such spaces are neither new nor untested. Some are embedded in monastic tradition, for the monastery is the archetypal ‘community of solitudes.’

“Some emerged over four hundred years of Quaker faith and practice. Some were revived in the transpersonal psychology movement of the mid-twentieth century. And some are embodied in the processes of spiritual formation that can be found at the heart of most of the world’s great wisdom traditions.

“Formation may be the best name for what happens in a circle of trust, because the word refers, historically, to soul work done in community. But a quick disclaimer is in order, since formation sometimes means a process quite contrary to the one described in this book-a process in which the pressure of orthodox doctrine, sacred text, and institutional authority is applied to the misshapen soul in order to conform it to the shape dictated by some theology. This approach is rooted in the idea that we are born with souls deformed by sin, and our situation is hopeless until the authorities ‘form’ us properly.”

[Parker J. Palmer. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 2004. Page 57.]

“Spiritual communities have long recognized how difficult it is to affirm the reality of love when history and our own biographies offer so much evidence of division, destruction, and death. So they have developed spiritual disciplines, daily practices by which we can resist these deformations of self and world, recalling and recovering that image of love which seems hidden or beyond reach. Through the disciplines of spiritual formation we seek to be re-formed in our original, created image.

“These disciplines have been especially emphasized in the monastery, that ancient form of spiritual community in which our schools have one historic taproot, and from which we can recover a sense of education as a process of spiritual formation. From monastic tradition I have learned three spiritual disciplines, three ways of maintaining contact with love’s reality in the midst of misleading appearances: the study of sacred texts, the practice of prayer and contemplation, and the gathered life of the community itself.

“Through the study of sacred texts, I maintain contact with the spiritual tradition, with the seeking and finding of those who have gone before. These texts allow me to return to times of deeper spiritual insight than my own, to recollect truths that my culture obscures, to have companions on the spiritual journey who, though long dead, may be more alive spiritually than many who are with me now. In such study my heart and mind are reformed by the steady press of tradition against the distortions of my day.”

[Parker J. Palmer. To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 2010. Pages 17-18.]

“Communities of shared inquiry and discovery, particularly those that are sustained over a significant period of time, play a key role in transformational learning throughout adulthood. Most recently, I have witnessed the power of ‘a learning community’ while teaching both in a nine-month cohort-based executive leadership program for mid-career business executives at Seattle University and in a leadership retreat cycle at the Whidbey Institute in which professionals from across sectors gather as a cohort once each season for an entire year. But it must be observed that especially in the twenty-something years of emerging adulthood, while access to a good mentor can be valuable, participation in ‘a mentoring community’ serves a yet more profound formation of orienting lifelong commitments. Young adults are given access to ‘dreams’ by intention or default—and the value assumptions that shape those dreams will be determined by the socialities that undergird them. Higher education at its best provides access to mentoring communities—whether they are formed in a classroom, seminar, chemistry lab, residence hall, or on the soccer field—in which young, emerging adults can engage the big questions of our time and experience worthy ways of thinking and being, becoming adept in practices of mind, heart, and hand that serve the common good.” [Parker J. Palmer and Arthur Zajonc. The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 2010. Pages 177-178.]

“In contrast to these hard questions, the popular image of community is distressingly sentimental. We—especially white, middle-class folk—value community for the personal nurture it promises but ignore its challenges of political and economic justice. We speak of ‘life together’ in romantic terms that bear little resemblance to the difficult discipline of a common life.

“But the problems of our age will yield neither to personalism nor to romance. If the idea of community is to speak to our condition, we must change the terms of the discussion. So I write about community partly to correct the romantic fallacy: if we seek a dream community, reality will quickly defeat us, and the struggle for community cannot afford such losses.

“I write, too, because the religious basis of community is so often ignored—and I believe that religion points not toward fantasy but toward ultimate reality. The idea of community is at the heart of every great religious tradition. The Hebrew Bible is primarily the narrative of a community making and breaking its covenant with God. The New Testament affirms that the capacity to join with others in a life of prayer and service is one test of receiving God’s spirit. Acts of the Apostles, for example, reports that the formation of a community of shared goods was among the first fruits of Pentecost: ‘All whose faith had drawn them together held everything in common: they would sell their property and possessions and make a general distribution as the need of each required’ (Acts 2:44-45).…

“And from the heart of my own spiritual experience, I know that God is constantly moving within and among us, calling us back to that unity, that wholeness, in which we were created. If we will respond to that call, we can make a critical witness to the possibility of a future both human and divine.…

“Much has been said and written about the quest for community in our time, but the rhetoric is not reflected in our actions. We may honor community with our words, but the history of the twentieth century has been a determined movement away from life together.”

[Parker J. Palmer. The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 2008. Pages 66-67.]

“From 1994 to 1996, I led the first Teacher Formation group. My gratitude goes to the inspiring Michigan public school teachers who made that experiment so successful: Maggie Adams, Jack Bender, Mark Bond, Lauri Bowersox, Margaret Ells, Richard Fowler, Linda Hamel, Eleanor Hayward, Marianne Houston, Katherine Kennedy, Cheri McLoughan, Michael Perry, Linda Powell, Toni Rostami, Rick Serafini, Gerald Thompson, and Marcia Weinhold.

“I am grateful, too, for the people who are giving the Teacher Formation Program a larger and continuing life. They include Judy Brown, Tony Chambers, Charlie Glasser, Eleanor Greenslade, Sally Hare, Marianne Houston, Marcy Jackson, Rick Jackson, Mickey Olivanti, Megan Scribner, David Sluyter, and Penny Williamson, my friends and gifted partners in program development; the staff of the Fetzer Institute, whose devotion and hard work-answering calls, writing ing memos, issuing checks, cleaning rooms, caring for the grounds, and putting food on the table-has kept the program afloat; and the trustees of the institute who believe in this work and have backed it: Janis Claflin, Bruce Fetzer, Wink Franklin, Lynne Twist, Frances Vaughan, Jeremy Waletzky, and Judith Skutch Whitson (trustee emerita).

[Parker J. Palmer. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass imprint of John Wiley & Sons Publishers. 1998. Kindle edition.]

“In addition to discernment, there is another reason to teach our students how to cultivate community. Every serious effort at social change requires organized groups of people who can support each other when the demands of being a change agent threaten to overwhelm them and can generate the collective power necessary to make a difference. Without communities that encourage us to assert core professional values in settings where we may well suffer for doing so, most of us will revert to conventional ‘wisdom’ and refuse to wear our hearts on our sleeves. Which brings me to my fifth and final immodest proposal for the education of the new professional.” [Parker J. Palmer, “A New Professional: The Aims of Higher Education Revisited.” Change. Volume 39, number 6, November/December 2007. Pages 7-12.]

“The root fallacy in the pedagogy of most of our institutions is that the individual is the agent of knowing and therefore the focus for teaching and learning. We all know that if we draw the lines of instruction in most classrooms, they run singularly from teacher to each individual student. These lines are there for the conve- nience of the instructor, not for their corporate reality. They do not reveal a complex web of relationships between teacher and students and subject that would look like true community.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Community, Conflict, and Ways of Knowing: Ways to Deepen Our Educational Agenda.” Change. Volume 26, number 3, May/June 1994. Page 40.]

“The black liberation movement and the women’s movement would have died aborning if racist and sexist organizations had been allowed to define the rules of engagement. But for some blacks, and for some women, that resistance affirmed and energized the struggle. In both movements, advocates of change found sources of countervailing power outside of organizational structures, and they nurtured that power in ways that eventually gave them immense leverage on organizations.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Divided No More: A Movement Approach to Educational Reform.” Change. Volume 24, number 2, March/April 1992. Pages 10-17.]

“Spiritual communities have long recognized how difficult it is to affirm the reality of love when history and our own biographies offer so much evidence of division, destruction, and death. So they have developed spiritual disciplines, daily practices by which we can resist these deformations of self and world, recalling and recovering that image of love which seems hidden or beyond reach. Through the disciplines of spiritual formation we seek to be re-formed in our original, created image.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Education as Spiritual Formation.” Educational Horizons. Volume 82, number 1, fall 2003. Pages 55-67.]

“Experience tells me not only that there is a deep reservoir of insight about teaching among faculty, but also that faculty have a deep need to draw upon that life-giving source. The reservoir waits to be tapped by leaders who perceive its presence, who expect and invite people to draw upon it, who offer excuses and permissions for the dialogue to happen—and who can help make that dialogue less woeful than it sometimes is and as winsome as it can easily be.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Good Talk about Good Teaching: Improving Teaching through Conversation and Community.” Change. Volume 25, number 6, November/December 1993. Pages 8-13.]

“Good teachers dwell in the mystery of good teaching until it dwells in them. As they explore it alone and with others, the insight and energy of mystery begins to inform and animate their work. They discover and develop methods of teaching that emerge from their own integrity—but they never reduce their teaching to technique.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery.” Change. Volume 22, number 1, January/February 1990. Pages 10-16.]

“After three decades of trying to learn my craft [teaching], every class comes down to this: my students and I, face to face, engaged in an ancient and exacting exchange called education. The techniques I have mastered do not disappear, but neither do they suffice. Face to face with my students, only one resource is at my immediate command: my identity, my selfhood, my sense of this ‘I’ who teaches—without which I have no sense of the ‘Thou’ who learns.” [Parker J. Palmer, “The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching.” Change. Volume 29, number 6, November/December 1997. Pages 14-21.]

“The presuppositions of religion are essentially objective; they are held to correspond to something objectively true in human experience. The presuppositions of science are essentially pragmatic; they are held simply to be usable vehicles in ordering chaotic sense data. To claim any basic continuity between the two is to do violence to both.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Objectivism and Pragmatism in Religion, Science, and Society.” The Christian Scholar. Volume 49, number 1, spring 1966. Pages 17-23.]

“From my mid-thirties through my mid-forties, I served as dean of studies at Pendle Hill, a Quaker living-learning community near Philadelphia. My students were adults, ages 18 to 88, who were not looking for grades or credits or credentials, none of which Pendle Hill offered; they were looking for meaning in life. In the spring of 1977 I taught a class on Thomas Merton, whose work has been a source of great meaning for me. For our final session, I planned to show a film of [Thomas] Merton’s last talk, given just an hour or two before a freak accident took his life.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Taking pen in hand: A writer’s life and faith.” Christian Century. Volume 127, number 18, September 2010. Pages 22-25.]

“Engaging students in the community of truth does not require that we put the chairs in a circle and have a conversation. A sense of connectedness can also be generated through lectures, lab exercises, fieldwork, service learning, electronic media, and many other pedagogies, both traditional and experimental. Like teaching itself, creating educational community can never be reduced to technique. It emerges from a principle that can express itself in endless varieties, depending on the identity and integrity of the teacher.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Teaching & Learning in Community.” About Campus. Volume 2, number 5, November–December 1997. Pages 4-13.]

“… the models of reality we have in higher education have a tremendous impact on the structures and practices of the educational enterprise. I think the models of reality we had previously were atomistic and Darwinian in a competitive sense. But today we increasingly have models of reality which are essentially communal in nature. They come out of systems theory and out of ecological studies (for example, the hypothesis that the earth is a living organism). So right at the heart of the academic enterprise the word community turns out to have a rich and resonant meaning.” [Parker J. Palmer, “Teaching, Learning, and Community: An Interview with Parker J. Palmer.” Charles S. Claxton, interviewer. Journal of Developmental Education. Volume 15, number 2, winter 1991. Pages 22-25 and 33.]

“… the core human reality that ‘heart and soul’ language points to has been given many names by diverse traditions. Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine in every being. Christians may call it spirit, though some (e.g., the Quakers) call it the inner teacher, and Thomas Merton (a Trappist monk) called it true self. Secular humanists call it identity and integrity. Depth psychologists call it the outcome of individuation. And there are common idioms for it in everyday speech, as when we say of someone we know and care about, ‘He just isn’t himself these days,’ or, ’She seems to have found herself.’” [Parker J. Palmer, “Teaching with Heart and Soul: Reflections on Spirituality in Teacher Education.” Journal of Teacher Education. Volume 54, number 5, November–December 2003. Pages 376-385.]

“Listening for the inner teacher has nothing to do with ‘navel-gazing’ or narcissism. It has everything to do with reclaiming our own inner truth and our right relation to the world—the world for which we all bear such deep responsibility.” [Parker J. Palmer, “To whom do you report?” The Journal for Quality and Participation. Volume 24, number 3, fall 2001. Pages 19-20.]

“In the broadest sense of the word, contemplation means creating sacred space to be still, to rest in God, to reflect, to look inward, to attend to the inner life, and simply to be with God in solitude, silence, and stillness. Solitude, silence, and stillness are in fact the qualities of contemplative prayer. Contemplation in its broad sense can also be understood, as Parker Palmer describes, as ‘anything that dismantles our illusions.’” [Phileena Heuertz, “Contemplative Activism: A Transformative Way.” Conversations: A Forum for Authentic Transformation. Volume 8, issue 2, fall/winter 2010. Pages 46-51.]

“From 1998 to 2008, the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) offered its employees a variety of options for formation, a type of reflective practice. The district encompasses ten locations, seven of them independently accredited colleges. Formation is based primarily on Parker Palmer’s model for Circles of Trust as described in A Hidden Wholeness …. Palmer is a writer on issues of education, community, and spirituality who was a consultant to the DCCCD, visiting twice during each academic year from 1998 to 2003. During that time, formation was introduced through short retreats called samplers and took root as longer retreats as a form of staff development offered to employees by the district’s office of staff and organizational development and as a campus-based activity supported by local staff development funds.” [Ann Faulkner and Guy Gooding, “Offering Reflection to an Organization.” New Directions for Community Colleges. Volume 2010, number 151, fall 2010. Pages 91-100.]

“This book seeks to contrast the notion of peace commonly adopted (and acted upon) with a conception of peace as an activity. But to speak of ‘the notion of peace commonly adopted’ is already to jump ahead of ourselves. The word ‘peace’ is used in a wide variety of ways that are connected with diverse assumptions and practices.…

“… Instead of thinking of peace as a state in which hostile conflict is absent or in which tranquil concord is present, the third way of understanding peace views it as an activity. What kind of activity? The activity of cultivating agreements.…

“One problem is the temptation to keep thinking in war-like terms when we try to express the idea of peace as an activity.…

“… we begin to verge on a rather different conception of peace. We begin to find ourselves saying what it is that people should be doing instead of engaging in confrontation or aggression and the like. And at that point we begin to formulate a logically affirmative notion of peace. Well and good. But the question then is: Precisely what should we adopt as our conception of the essence of peace as a positively distinguishable activity?

“And once we define it thus, we no longer are conceiving peace primarily as an absence. The fact that peace involves an absence of war is no longer a central and essentially definitive feature of it.”

[Gray Cox. The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace as Action. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 1986. Ebook edition.]

“Guanxi is a form of asymmetrical exchange of favours between persons on the basis of enduring sentimental ties in which enhancement of public reputation is the aspirational outcome …. In this sense the benefits of guanxi exchanges are normative and reputational. Material advantages can also be achieved through guanxi exchanges when their realization is embedded in reputational enhancement.…

“In spite of the relative disciplinary segmentation of guanxi research there are at least two common and seldom disputed elements underpinning the diverse accounts of guanxi. One of these is the assumption that in the binary or dyadic relations of guanxi trust functions as a means or principle of governance that maintains the stability and endurance of the relationship. The second element of commonality, related to the first, is that tie strength is regarded as key to understanding the character of the linkage between and therefore the availability of persons who participate in guanxi relations.”

[Jack Barbalet, “Dyadic characteristics of guanxi and their consequences.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. January, 2017. Pages 1-16.]

“While a vast body of literature claims to examine [Karl] Marx critically, much of it is cast through the lens of ideology. One issue caught in its prism is the presence of evaluative language in Marx’s ‘later’ works. Critics have seized on its presence, contending that it contradicts his theory of history, rendering his critique of political economy nothing more than proletarian ideology. These criticisms are based on an inconsistency that is only apparent. As this dissertation will demonstrate, Marx is able to consistently and objectively combine evaluation and description in his ‘later’ works because embedded within his dialectical method is an ethic of self-actualization I call Dialectical Humanism.” [Hernan David Carrillo. Dialectical Humanism: An Ethic of Self-Actualization. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Kansas. Lawrence, Kansas. 2008. Page 1.]

“A more concrete and nuanced understanding of [Karl] Marx reveals that he did not retain [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s formulation of the relation between freedom and self-actualization, but inverted it in the process of forming his own critical project, eschewing appeals to justice, rights, goods, or virtues in favor of a long standing concern for self-actualization which get expressed through a set of concepts rooted in his humanism, realized in history, and applied by means of his dialectical method to the critique of political economy. That his ethic of self-actualization remained undeveloped and implicit may make it problematic for those who want to ‘constitute the future’ or ‘settle things for all times,’ but it didn’t make him inconsistent or compromise his objectivity. It merely reflects the fact that Marx tried to remain consistent with his materialism until he could elaborate this ethic more fully.” [Hernan David Carrillo. Dialectical Humanism: An Ethic of Self-Actualization. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Kansas. Lawrence, Kansas. 2008. Page 155.]

“We begin with the assertion that epistemological standpoints shape – and are shaped by – ethical principles and that epistemologies of action are constantly evolving. Yet, while many contemporary planning theories are influenced by post-structural and postcolonial epistemologies that recognise the value of subjective and situated knowledge, work on planning ethics tends to retain a focus on normative ethical theories. This focus precludes further explorations of the nature and meaning of adopted ethical values. By means of a case example, we suggest that some engagement with metaethical questions might offer scholars of the global South-East an alternative basis for developing knowledge.…

“… as we already know, epistemologies of action undergo periodic shifts in accordance with ever-changing philosophical understandings of the world.…

“Granted, epistemology and ethics are usually considered as two distinct philosophical domains. However, when epistemology appeals to the character traits of an epistemic agent as a condition for the formation of knowledge, it may then be argued that ethical commitments function as a productive component of the epistemic process ….”

[Tanja Winkler and James Duminy, “Planning to change the world? Questioning the normative ethics of planning theories.” Planning Theory. Volume 15, number 2, May 2016. Pages 111-129.]

“First I show why freedom as non-domination is a personal good that practically everyone has reason to want and, more generally, to value. Then I argue that it is something which inherently concerns political institutions, not something that can just be left to individuals to further by other means. And third, I maintain that non-domination is a goal which such institutions should seek to promote, not a constraint that they have to honour in the pursuit of other goals; I defend a consequentialist version of republicanism. This republican doctrine, as we shall see, is a consequentialism with a difference: it allows us to say that the institutions which promote people’s freedom as non-domination go to constitute that freedom, not to cause it; the doctrine does not countenance any temporal or causal gulf between civic institutions and the freedom of citizens.” [Philip Pettit. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press imprint of Oxford University Press. 1997. Pages 80-81.]

“I shall argue that a republican regime which seeks to maximize nondomination is bound to avoid initiatives that leave the intensity of non-domination unequal, but that no such stricture applies to its leaving the extent of non-domination—in effect, leaving material resources—unequal. Without necessarily having to embrace a material egalitarianism, then, republican consequentialism is required to support what we can describe as structural egalitarianism. There may be many reasons why republicanism should seek to reduce material inequalities, of course, as we shall see in the next chapter; but the connection with material egalitarianism is not as tight—not as independent of empirical contingencies—as the connection with structural egalitarianism.” [Philip Pettit. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press imprint of Oxford University Press. 1997. Page 113.]

“… I argue that under the older, republican way of construing freedom—under a construal of freedom as nondomination rather than noninterference—the ideal is not consistent in this way with humiliation and a lack of honor; some plausible assumptions ensure that if people enjoy freedom as nondomination, then they will also enjoy honor. At least so far as its citizens are concerned—and that will be my focus here—the free republic is bound to be a decent society.… I offer some historical reflections on the shift from the republican way of thinking about freedom and politics to the classical liberal approach and I speculate about a connection between that shift and a diminished concern with honor and decency.” [Philip Pettit, “Freedom with Honor: A Republican Ideal.” Social Research. Volume 64, number 1, spring 1997. Pages 52-76.]

“The republican conception of freedom was certainly negative, … but it did not represent liberty as noninterference in the manner that [Thomas] Hobbes inaugurated and that came to prominence among nineteenth-century liberal writers. It was, rather, a conception of liberty in which the antonym is not interference as such but rather dominatio or domination. Domination is subjection to an arbitrary power of interference on the part of another—a dominus or master—even another who chooses not actually to exercise that power. Republican freedom, … should be defined as nondomination, not noninterference.” [Philip Pettit, “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner.” Political Theory. Volume 30, number 3, June 2002. Pages 339-356.]

“On the republican conception, freedom is a matter of enjoying a suitable civic status. Spelled out in greater detail, it requires, first, a freedom in the exercise of certain choices; second, a freedom in the exercise of those choices that is secured on a certain basis; and third, a freedom that is understood in a distinctive manner, requiring non-domination rather than non-interference.” [Philip Pettit, “Legitimacy and Justice in Republican Perspective.” Current Legal Problems. Volume 65, number 1, 2012. Pages 59-82.]

“Republican philosophy identifies a complaint that is meant to be at once personally motivating and politically feasible. It indicts the evil of subjection to another’s will—particularly in important areas of personal choice—as an ill that we all recognise and recoil from and at the same time as an ill that the state is well placed to deal with. I believe that such subjection can be effectively corralled and reduced, though certainly not wholly eliminated, by means of political initiative. And yet it takes only a little imagination to realise just how repellent this subjection can be.” [Philip Pettit, “The republic, old and new.” Renewal. Volume 20, number 2/3, fall 2012. Pages 47-60.]

“Whatever nonarbitrary government decides to allow in the zone or reasonable disagreement is bound to count as nonarbitrary and nondominating; so long as government follows a suitable procedure in reaching its decision, it cannot get things wrong. As the toss of a fair coin may determine, as a matter of pure procedure, that the selected outcome is fair, so government fiat in the zone of reasonable disagreement will determine as a matter of pure procedure that a favored practice or policy is nonarbitrary. The goal of promoting nondomination cannot be invoked, then, to give advice to government on what policy it should adopt in the area, or to provide a basis for complaint about what government does: ‘any actions, and therefore any interference, licensed by its decision will not be arbitrary.’ Republican theory will be reduced, by its own strictures, to silence; it will be self-stultifying, if not self-defeating.” [Philip Pettit, “The Determinacy of Republican Policy: A Reply to McMahon.” Philosophy & Public Affairs. Volume 34, number 3, summer 2006. Pages 275-283.]

“Some of the main distinctions that have been offered in the literature—freedom ‘to’ versus freedom ‘from,’ freedom as an ‘opportunity concept’ versus freedom as an ‘exercise concept,’ or naturalism versus ‘ethical naturalism’—have been difficult to sustain. This difficulty is one of the reasons why some have now started to speak about ‘republican freedom’: a theory of freedom that attempts to combine elements of positive and negative freedoms into a single concept. In other words, the failure to offer a sustainable distinction has resulted in a weakening of the dichotomy in principle, as well as of the concepts of positive and negative freedom independently of each other.” [Maria Dimova Cookson, “A New Scheme of Positive and Negative Freedom: Reconstructing T. H. Green on Freedom.” Political Theory. Volume 31, number 4, August 2003. Pages 508-532.]

“My aim has been to show that Aristotelian naturalism can vindicate the distinctive value of practical wisdom through demonstrating its essential connection to the moral virtues. It is often alleged that such an approach is a non-starter because it requires human nature to take on an ‘unconvincing speaking part’ in David Wiggins’ memorable phrase …. The assumption behind this charge is that Aristotelian ethical naturalism somehow takes human nature to be intrinsically normative.…

“… Achieving insight into what it is to live well, in the way that is necessary for achieving practical wisdom is therefore a distinctive epistemic achievement and one that requires us to tackle the issue of what makes practical wisdom itself good through understanding its connection with moral virtues. I have argued for what seems to me the most promising way of doing that in Aristotelian ethical naturalism.”

[John Hacker-Wright, “Skill, Practical Wisdom, and Ethical Naturalism.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Volume 18, number 5, November 2005. Pages 983-993.]

“Throughout this book I have been defending an ethical naturalism wherein what makes someone a good human being is having those traits, called ‘virtues,’ that reliably enable the realization of our natural human ends. I have argued against various metaphysical, metaethical, and biological challenges. In these final sections I raise my own challenge to the theory, a challenge … inspired by evolutionary biology. While a challenge to naturalized virtue ethics, it also brings to light a deep challenge to the very project of ethical naturalism. Naturalized virtue ethics meets this challenge by, in effect, provisionally acquiescing to it. I argue that, if naturalized virtue ethics, as I have presented it, is to be theoretically unified from a naturalistic perspective, it amounts to a kind of evolutionary ethics. It then must face the same questions as that controversial theory. First, why should we accept reproductive success, or anything else, as our natural end? And, second, why should we think that the telos involved, reproductive success, is good? One might avoid dealing with such issues by resisting the lure of theoretical unification, or even of ethical theory itself. However, with certain caveats, I am not sure those lures should be resisted.” [Stephen R. Brown. Moral Virtue and Nature: A Defense of Ethical Naturalism. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2008. Page 113]

“‘[Stephen R.] Brown concludes his book with the frank admission that the positing of reproductive success as our ultimate end makes his ethical theory purely ‘explanatory’ and ‘descriptive’, rather than vindicatory’ or ‘normative.’ …. But one wonders, at this point, whether Brown has articulated a moral theory at all. Certainly he has failed to provide one that is constrained by his oft-repeated claim … that moral theory must be able to appeal to commonsense moral intuitions, in order both to explain and to justify our commonsense moral beliefs. It is hard then to see how Brown hasn’t run foul of his own conception of moral theory, as we do not normally consider the content of our most deeply held moral beliefs to be justified on the grounds of the contribution it makes to the reproduction of certain genetic traits. And hence it is even harder to see why we should accept the theory that he has provided.” [Jennifer Frey, “Moral Virtue and Nature: A Defense of Ethical Naturalism.” Review article. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Volume 17, issue 5, December 2009. Pages 758-762.]

“This work explores and highlights how the African religion of Vodou and its ethic (i.e. syncretism, materialism, holism, communalism) gave rise to the Haitian spirit of communism in the provinces, mountains and urban slums of Haiti, which would be juxtaposed against the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the white, mulatto and petit-bourgeois classes …. This latter worldview, I go on to argue, exercised by the free bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites on the island undermined the revolutionary and independence movement of Haiti, and made it an apartheid state.…

“… What I am calling the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game of the Africans was, and is, reified and recursively reorganized and reproduced via the ideology of Vodou ….

“The African Religion of Vodou, in other words, gave rise to the spirit of communism or communal living based on subsistence agriculture, husbandry and komes, which the Africans, acting as both subjects and agents of the language game, transported with them to the Americas ….”

[Paul C. Mocombe, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; and the Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism.” Sociology. Volume 51, number 1, February 2017. Pages 76-90.]

“Because of the past influence of religion in our culture, many people (even some atheists) find it plausible to suppose that moral philosophy will have to be based on religious or theistic propositions. (It is worth noticing, though, that the ancient Greek philosophers never saw much need to base moral philosophy on religious beliefs, and most modern moral philosophers have not done so.)

“How could morality be ‘based on’ religion? Not every way in which religious or theistic propositions might be relevant to moral thinking amounts to basing moral philosophy on such propositions. In particular, the following three claims, even if true, would not show that moral philosophy has to be based on religion.…

“We sometimes refer to a motive for doing something as a ‘reason’ for doing it, but this is not to be confused with a justifying reason. The threat of a fine, for example, does much to motivate people not to park in certain areas, but the fine is not the reason that parking there is wrong, it’s not what makes it wrong. Likewise, God’s threats may merely motivate people to do what is already right, for justifying reasons having nothing to do with the threat.”

[Francis Snare. The Nature of Moral Thinking. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 13.]

“The current debate on water ethics is obscured by unclear conceptions, and consequently false oppositions (for example between commodification and human rights). Here I see a clear role for philosophers. If the ethical aspects of water governance are to be adequately addressed, profound knowledge of water, including partly technical (hydrological) knowledge, knowledge of the prevailing legal constraints and insights from policy sciences and institutional economics, should be applied with philosophical rigor. The fact that this will be a multidisciplinary enterprise does mean that it will be superficial. Addressing the water crisis requires that debate is conducted at various levels of generality and specificity and so must a proper account of water ethics contain various levels of abstraction. At the most abstract level, basic moral concepts, such as justice, autonomy, and democracy need to be developed, which requires the involvement of political philosophers and applied ethicists and scholars of other disciplines with a strong conceptual method (like legal and political theorists). At the mid-level, principles of equity and efficacy need to be taken into account.” [Neelke Doorn, “Water and Justice: Towards an Ethics of Water Governance.” Public Reason. Volume 5, number 1, 2013. Pages 97-114.]

“… [What was] clear from the analysis of the data was the deliberate use of a decision-making model as participants sought to resolve their ethical dilemmas. Although, the participants’ use of a model can be attributed to instructions they were given before they wrote their case studies. The model I had devised for the case study assignment consisted of five steps:

“I am calling the model that emerged from the data analysis a ‘contingency model’ because the ethical theory that participants chose to use to frame their analysis of their dilemmas appeared to be contingent upon the kind of dilemma and the moral intensity of the dilemma.…

“This investigation builds upon work of ethicists and researchers in ethical decision-making. While ndings are limited to the participants only, they underscore previous theory on contingency models in ethical decision-making. Further, they suggest that the type of ethical dilemma and the level of moral intensity of the ethical dilemma can inuence the decision-making process. In addition, a contingency model for ethical decision-making by educators is proposed for further study and possible use in professional education programs. It is expected that ndings will help inform planning courses in ethics education and add a new dimension to the discussion of ethical dilemmas in school communities.”

[James Green and Keith Walker, “A Contingency Model for Ethical Decision-making by Educational Leaders.” International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation. Volume 4, number 4, October–December 2009. Creative Commons. Pages 1-10.]

“This article has advanced critical digital health studies by exploring the potential of digital self-tracking technologies to work in the service of contemporary biopower and patriarchy. I would argue not only that digital self-tracking devices are themselves an undertheorized mechanism of biopower and patriarchy, but also that these devices signal and facilitate a broader convergence of biopolitical and patriarchal technologies which demands further critical examination. If we read these devices as a sign that power is increasingly exercised at the intersection of biopower and patriarchy – as I do – then further critical theory should attend to the ways in which technologies of gender regulation and retrenchment will increasingly work, and extend themselves, through biopolitical technologies, and vice versa.” [Rachel Sanders, “Self-tracking in the Digital Era: Biopower, Patriarchy, and the New Biometric Body Projects.” Body & Society. Volume 23, number 1, March 2017. Pages 36-63.]

“The force of embodied morality became manifest in ‘the form of protest from the victim’ ….

“… just as there seemed to be a gap between [Stanley] Milgram’s interpretative framework and his descriptive account of the experiment in terms of his first concept/‘force’ (i.e., embodied morality), there seems to be a similar gap between his claim to have operationalized the legitimate authority of science and his description of what he actually operationalized. But, equally, just as with the case of the first ‘force,’ it also seems possible that Milgram’s account of the experiments did not describe some meaningless procedure. In other words, just as his descriptive account suggests to have operationalized something meaningful in addition to or in the place of embodied morality, so it appears that, at the crucial points of disagreement, the authority figure of the experiment did not represent or only represent the legitimate authority of science, but rather something else: an authority that seemed to have both the wherewithal (i.e., the shock machine) and the clear intention (i.e., prods) to deliver painful and possibly lethal shocks.”

[Dávid Kaposi, “The resistance experiments: Morality, authority and obedience in Stanley Milgram’s account.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. April, 2017. Pages 1-20.]

“… [An] approach, in between legalism [letter of the law] and antinomian [lawless] unprincipledness, is situation ethics. (To jump from one polarity to the other would be only to go from the frying pan to the fire.) The situationist enters into every decision-making situation fully armed with the ethical maxims of his community and its heritage, and he treats them with respect as illuminators of his problems. Just the same he is prepared in any situation to compromise them or set them aside in the situation if love seems better served by doing so.

“Situation ethics goes part of the way with natural law, by accepting reason as the instrument of moral judgment, while rejecting the notion that the good is ‘given’ in the nature of things, objectively. It goes part of the way with Scriptural law by accepting revelation as the source of the norm while rejecting all ‘revealed’ norms or laws but the one command—to love God in the neighbor. The situationist follows a moral law or violates it according to love’s need. For example, ‘Almsgiving is a good thing if …’ The situationist never says, ‘Almsgiving is a good thing. Period!’ His decisions are hypothetical, not categorical. Only the commandment to love is categorically good. ‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another.‚ (Rom. 13:8.) If help to an indigent only pauperizes and degrades him, the situationist refuses a handout and finds some other way. He makes no law out of Jesus’ ‘Give to every one who begs from you.’ It is only one step from that kind of Biblicist literalism to the kind that causes women in certain sects to refuse blood transfusions even if death results—even if they are carrying a quckened fetus that will be lost too. The legalist says that even if he tells a man escaped from an asylum where his intended victim is, if he finds and murders him, at least only one sin has been committed (murder), not two (lying as well)!”

[Joseph Fletcher. Situation Ethics: The New Morality. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Westminster Press. 1966. Page 18.]

“What [Joseph] Fletcher accomplished was the complete reorientation of ethics away from the concepts of right and wrong, substituting for these the single consideration of what is most likely (even if seldom certain) to advance human well-being. This he never defines, correctly so. It cannot be defined, nor can any rule of morality – even the utilitarian rule of promoting human well-being – be derived from it.” [Richard Taylor, “Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, Once Again.” Free Inquiry. Volume 15, number 4, fall 1995. Pages 47-49.]

“It may seem strange to describe evolutionary ethics as looking for a substitute for divine assistance, since the workings of genetic mutation and natural selection would seem to belong to the category of our natural capacities. This would make evolutionary ethics a proposal that our capacities are in fact equal to the moral demand. But it is helpful to see evolution as a substitute for divine assistance, because it is proposed as operating beyond our conscious control. This gives us not a deus ex machina [Latin, deus ex māchina, ‘god from the machine’], but just a machina [Latin, ‘machine’]. Nevertheless, it is proposed as something external to the conscious life of practical agency, and as something which saves us from the otherwise tragic and irresoluble tension between duty and inclination. In fact some proponents of evolutionary ethics have been quite explicit about the idea that evolution functions as a replacement for God in solving the problem of the moral gap. Thus Donald Campbell proposes an account of social evolution that gives us a solution to what he sees as a biological bias that humans have towards egoism. Social evolution, he says, counteracts this bias at the level of social system preaching, which produces the demand for altruism.” [John E. Hare, “Naturalism and morality.” Naturalism: A critical analysis. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Pages 189-211.]

“If by practical reason we mean the type of reasoning used to guide action, then this notion might usefully substitute for ‘Ethics.’ Practical reason has the advantage of drawing attention to the extent to which reasoning about what to do is, indeed, a feature of practices, of embodied, situated actions. One feature work in Anglo-American philosophy on the broad topic of practical reason is the widespread problematization of the spaces in which practical reasoning is understood to take place ….” [Clive Barnett, “Geography and ethics: Placing life in the space of reasons.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 36, number 3, June 2012. Pages 379-388.]

“… his [Immanuel Kant’s] ethics is individualistic and cannot serve us in our most pressing need at the present day. And yet, despite these shortcomings, Kant’s ethics has sounded through the world with a clear, clarion note, has had a mighty awakening influence, and something like the flashes of the lightning that played on Sinai have played about it. It has had this influence because it emphasises the fundamental fact that the moral law is imperative, not subject to the peradventure of inclination, of temperament, or circumstance, an emphasis to which every moral being, at least in his higher moments, responds. It has had this influence because of the sublimity of the origin which he assigns to the moral law, because he translates it from the sphere of ephemeral utilities, whether individualistic or racial, into the region of eternal being, comparable with nothing in the physical universe except only the starry firmament. And last, and not least, because his own lofty personality shines through his written words. A man may be bigger than his creed, and, in the same way, he may tower above his philosophy.” [Felix Adler, “A Critique of Kant’s Ethics.” Mind. Volume 11, number 42, April 1902. Pages 162-195.]

“Why should we hesitate to acknowledge in the domain of ethics, what we concede in the realm of art and science? To say that unselfishness itself is only the more refined expression of a selfish instinct, is to use the term selfish with a double meaning, is a mere empty play on words. We have the innate need of harmony in the moral relations; this is our glory, and the stamp of the Divine upon our nature. We cannot demonstrate the existence of disinterested motives, any more than we can demonstrate that there is joy in the sunlight and freedom in the mountain breeze. The fact that we demand unselfishness in action alone assures us that the standard of enlightened self-interest is false.

“And indeed if we consult the opinions of men, where they are least likely to be warped by sophistry, we shall find that disinterestedness is the universal criterion by which moral worth is measured.”

[Felix Adler. Creed And Deed: A Series of Discourses. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1880. Pages 15-16.]

“… a willingness to advance the interests of a class or of a people is often no more than an enlarged egotism, with most of the defects of the narrower egotism, and must be regulated by a moral principle, if it is to attain to the dignity of a moral attribute. It is only by the conformity of our thoughts, our feelings, and our acts to principle, that morality is achieved. It is only by such means that the genial and attractive tendencies of our nature are converted into genuine virtues, and the way of escape from the double life is along the line of the moral transformation of our seeming virtues. Mend your virtues, and your vices will take care of themselves.” [Felix Adler. The Essentials of Spirituality. New York: James Pott & Co. 1905. Pages 139-140).]

“… morality ought to cover the whole of conduct. The definition of ethics as a science of relations or limits removes this stumbling-block. Ethics stands at the frontier.” [Felix Adler. The Moral Instruction of Children. New York. D. Appleton and Company. 1892. Pages 23-24.]

“It is the aim of the Ethical Societies to extend the area of moral co-operation, so as to include a part, at least, of the inner moral life; to unite men of diverse opinions and beliefs in the common endeavor to explore the field of duty; to gain clearer perceptions of right and wrong; to study with thorough-going zeal the practical problems of social, political, and individual ethics, and to embody the new insight in manners and institutions.” [Felix Adler, “The Freedom of Ethical Fellowship.” International Journal of Ethics. Volume 1, number 1, October 1890. Pages 16-30.]

“No single supreme individual … can … embody the moral ideal. The Godhead conceived of as a single being may be designated as infinite, but infinite in such connection means a certain type, or, as we shall now say, the discharge of a certain social function raised to the nth degree. The bearer of that function is represented as performing it in the most perfect manner possible. But he cannot be the true embodiment of perfection, because other functions, equally indispensable, are excluded from the conception of him. It may be that he is represented as the divine father. In that case, the function of fatherhood is idealized or raised to the nth degree; but motherhood, sisterhood, brotherhood, etc., are omitted.” [Felix Adler, “The Moral Ideal.” International Journal of Ethics. Volume 20, number 4, July 1910. Pages 387-394.]

“Let us consider … the silence of privacy; the law of silence that protects whatever specifically concerns ourselves from the prying curiosity of others. There are certain intimate thoughts which we express only to our intimate friends; nay, certain thoughts which perhaps we do not divulge even to these, which even our nearest ones must content themselves to guess at, to divine. There is, or ought to be, for every one, a certain territory which he may properly fence in against all comers. The right to be uncommunicative, with regard to certain matters, has been slowly acquired, and the extent to which it is conceded may be regarded as a measure of civilization. Children, among themselves, do not tolerate incommunicativeness at all.” [Felix Adler, “The Moral Value of Silence” International Journal of Ethics. Volume 8, number 3, April 1898. Pages 345-357.]

“Whatever differences of view might arise between a Positivist and an Ethical movement would be found—not in the common ground which would extend over the entire programme of an Ethical Association—but in the further aim of the Positivist movement to add to ethical culture Philosophy and Religion. It would serve little purpose to enlarge on the ground which is common to both Positivist and Ethical movements. It will be more useful to state the grounds which, in the former point of view, make the ultimate extension of the ethical culture to Philosophy and Religion not only legitimate, but indispensable. Right conduct is the true end of a worthy human life. But our conduct is ultimately determined—not by what we are taught to do, or by what we should like to do—but by what we believe and what we revere.” [Felix Adler, “The Relation of Ethical Culture to Religion and Philosophy.” International Journal of Ethics. Volume 8, number 3, April 1894. Pages 335-347.]

“… Atheism —well, truly, if that means the denial of a being conceived by superstitious mortals in the image of themselves, a ‘big man’ above the clouds, then the sooner we accept Atheism the better. But then some of the greatest and truest teachers of religion whom mankind to-day honors and loves, yea, celebrates in admiration and in pride, have been Atheists ; and we should esteem it no mean privilege to be numbered among the least of their disciples. But if Atheism means —and this, in any proper definition of the word, alone it does mean—the assertion of the rule of chance, the denial of the transcendent importance of morality, the blasphemy against the Ideal, then is there no system from which we so deeply, so utterly revolt as this.

“Long enough now have we kept silence; long enough have we allowed the charge of Atheism to be brought against ue with indifference hecause we believed it to he dictated by personal motives. But there comes a time for breaking silence. The work which this Society has begun is growing. I cannot bear the thought that any of those who are really at heart with us should be separated from us by an odious name, an untrue alarm. I say, then, that the charge of Atheism as directed against this Society is false, and I am compelled to fling back the charge upon the very head of those who most persistently urge it.…

“The people want a confession of faith, I am told. Hear, then, mine—a simple one. I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the law of righteousness is the sanctitication of human life, and I believe that in furthering and fulfilling that law I also am hallowed in the service of the unknown God.”

[Felix Adler. Atheism: A Lecture by Felix Adler, Ph.D., Before the Society of Ethical Culture, Sunday, October 6ᵗʰ, 1879. New York: Co-operative Printers’ Association. 1879. Pages 17-19.]

“The world is in such a situation that we can say to the nations, Let us cease accretion. The present situation is the result of accretion, the result of wrongs—recent or very recent, or at least not so far distant in the past—wrongs that still rancor in the conscience of the present generation. Our friends, the Poles, would not be very happy in studying the geographical distribution or dismemberment of the country for which they have not yet, after all these years, lost their patriotic resentment. Then there is the fact that England has taken possession of all the corner lots on the globe, and that there are nations that once were great mercantile powers before England had achieved its power on the waters who seek their right to live and to grow and to expand. I call your attention sharply to these points.” [Felix Adler, “Justice the Basis of International Peace.” The Advocate of Peace (1894-1920). Volume 75, number 8, August and September 1913. Pages 179-180.]

“It is the ethical element of religion which lends such sublime majesty to the language of the prophets. It is this which gives so sweet and fascinating a power to the loving words of Jesus. It is this which became a mighty lever in [Martin] Luther’s hands, where with he lifted the Mediæval Church off its foundations. Has this ethical element become less important in the modern age? Is there a less imperative need of developing it? Men follow the pursuits of science and art, as if these could replace the direct study of ethics, the direct tutoring of the will. Men labor for wealth and creature comforts as if ethical considerations did not exist. But does science, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, indeed suffice for the building up of our humanity? Does the cultus of the beautiful satisfy all our spiritual needs? Does the tremendous progress of the industrial arts tend to exalt, or does it not often lower the true standard of manhood among those who are engaged in the race for wealth? Is not righteousness as important as knowledge and beauty? Does not morality, apart from science and art, apart from mythological religion, require to be cultivated for its own sake and by its own methods? Is there no need of a special ethical culture at the present day?” [Felix Adler, “A Secular View of Moral Training.” The North American Review. Volume 136, number 318, May 1883. Pages 446-453.]

“It is the business of the moral instructor in the school to deliver to his pupil the subject-matter of morality, but not to deal with the sanctions of it; to give his pupils a clear understanding of what is right and what is wrong, but not to enter into the question why the right should be done and the wrong avoided. Let us suppose that the teacher is dealing with veracity. He says to his pupil: Thou shalt not lie. He takes it for granted that the pupil feels the force of this commandment, and ought to yield obedience to it. A young child that should ask me, Why ought I not to lie? I should suspect of quibbling and dishonest intentions. I would hold up to the child the ought in all its awful majesty. The right to reason about these matters cannot be considered until after the mind has attained a certain maturity. And, as a matter of fact, every good child agrees with me unhesitatingly when I say, It is wrong to lie. There is an answering echo in its heart that confirms my words. But what, then, is my business as a moral instructor? In the first place, to deepen the impression of the wrongfulness of a lie and the sacredness of truth, by the very solemnity with which I speak the words, by the spirit in which I approach the subject. My first business is to convey the spirit of moral reverence to my pupils. In the next place, I ought to quicken the pupils’ perceptions as to what is right and wrong; in this case, as to what is a lie and what is not.” [Felix Adler, “The Problem of Unsectarian Moral Instruction.” International Journal of Ethics. Volume 2, number 1, Octoer 1891. Pages 11-19.]

“Our worldview [i.e., among members of the American Ethical Union] rests on a natural interpretation of reality. As philosophic naturalists it follows that we place ethical proprieties, thought, and considerations likewise in the natural world. In philosophic-speak that’s ethical naturalism. Meaning we turn to each other, in mutual respect, rather than to any higher or external power for our understandings of right and wrong. And we derive our sense of duty and obligation from within that same natural realm. Thus our ethics underlie our concern for others.” [Tony Hileman, “The Ethical Center of Social Action.” Platform address to the New York Society for Ethical Culture. September 9th, 2007. Pages 1-6. Retrieved on July 3rd, 2016.]

“Last week in New York Dr. John Elliott, of the New York Ethical Society, told me the following story: He was conducting a class in ethics with a number of East Side boys, and by way of illustration had told the story of Nero, expatiating at some length upon his wickedness, that among other things he had killed his grandmother, burned Rome, and so forth. Finding one of his auditors very indifferent to this stirring tale, he addressed him directly: ‘What do you think of such a man, Louis?’ Louis shrugged his shoulders, and replied that he ‘didn’t think nothing about him.’ Dr. Elliott, seeing that he had made a mistake in appealing to Louis’s head rather than his heart, asked again with some heat, ‘Well, Louis, how do you feel about such a man?’ Louis again shrugged his shoulders and replied with supreme indifference, ‘He ain’t never done nothing to me.’ After all, we are amazingly dependent upon our experiences, not so much for our information and understanding as for the selection of objects which stir us to championship.” [Jane Addams, “The Chicago Settlements and Social Unrest.” Charities and The Commons. Number 20, May 1908. Pages 155-166.]

“The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited several people representing the then new Settlement movement, that they might discuss with others the general theme of Philanthropy and Social Progress.

“I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in Plymouth, both because I have found it impossible to formulate with the same freshness those early motives and strivings, and because, when published with other papers given that summer, it was received by the Settlement people themselves as a satisfactory statement.”

[Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1911. Page 113.]

“Jane Addams not only created a location for people in the Hull House neighborhood to receive help and support but soon realized that the broader society needed to change in order to improve living conditions for the poor. She worked tirelessly to change the social and legal, economic and political systems that contributed to abysmal conditions for those in the Hull House neighborhood. She advocated for child labor laws, effective garbage pick-up, and better conditions for factory workers, among other causes. Although she was a regular attendee and lecturer at both the Unitarian church and the Ethical Culture society in Chicago, she retained her membership in the Presbyterian church she had joined as a young adult. In her later years, Addams wrote books and lectured all over the country, spotlighting the necessity of work like hers to ensure that all people could be part of a healthy democracy. In 1931, she received a Nobel Peace Prize for her groundbreaking work, which was a forerunner to modern social work. Following her death in 1935, a funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull House, where she had lived and worked for 46 years.” [Amber Beland and Manish Mishra-Marzetti. What We Choose: Ethics for Unitarian Universalists—A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults. Boston, Massachusetts: Unitarian Universalist Association. 2012. Page 97.]

“The authority of an association may be justified if it facilitates its members’ compliance with reasons that apply to them, especially reasons that are particular to the members’ association. This results in the recognition of two types of authority in the state: first-order authority, which the state has by virtue of being an association of citizens; and second-order authority, which it has by virtue of providing the institutional context in which other associations can exercise their authority more effectively. The resulting image of the state may better acknowledge the variety of authoritative claims made by the various associations that effectively hold the allegiance of individuals.…

“… This … pluralist account allows for the recognition of legitimate authority in associations, but it also necessitates the recognition of the authority of the state, both a direct or first-order authority over persons qua citizens, and an indirect or second-order authority over persons qua members of various groups. Thus, while vindicating the authority of associations, I hope to repudiate the antinomian stance of much of political pluralist theory, and set it on sounder footing.”

[Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli, “The Problem of Pluralist Authority.” Political Studies. Volume 62, number 3, October 2014. Pages 556-572.]

“Metaculture is discourse in the strong sense of that versatile term: a historically formed set of topics and procedures that both drives and regulates the utterance of the individuals who inhabit it, and assigns them definite positions in the field of meaning it delimits. The position of seeing and speaking and writing in metacultural discourse, the kind of subject any individual ‘becomes’ in practising it, is culture itself.… For now, let me stress that no one, to my knowledge, has ever described themselves as a practitioner of ‘metacultural discourse.’ The term and the concept have emerged from the critical work of writing this book. If any one term or reference or affiliation might be said to link all the writers discussed here – and in bare truth there is none – it would be the more familiar culture.” [Francis Mulhern. Culture/Metaculture. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Page xiv.]

“‘Metaculture’ names a modern discursive formation in which ‘culture,’ however understood, speaks of its own generality and historical conditions of existence. Its inherent strategic impulse—failing which it would be no more than descriptive anthropology—is to mobilize ‘culture’ as a principle against the prevailing generality of ‘politics’ in the disputed plane of social authority. What speaks in metacultural discourse is the cultural principle itself, as it strives to dissolve the political as locus of general arbitration in social relations.” [Francis Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture.” New Left Review. Series II, number 16, July–August 2002. Pages 86-104.]

“Summarily defined, metacultural discourse is discourse in which culture addresses its own generality and conditions of existence. It is the generality of social sense-making that is put in question, not merely this or that cultural form or practice. That is one indication of the prefix meta-. The other is reflexivity – and not in the truistic sense that no discourse on culture can itself be anything other than an instance of culture. Metaculture is reflexive in the strong sense that the subject-position of the discourse is itself a normative intuition of the cultural.” [Francis Mulhern, “The end of politics: Culture, nation and other fundamentalisms.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 112, March/April 2002. Pages 25-30.]

“The culture circle links the following three dialectical and interdisciplinary phases: (1) thematic investigation, (2) encoding/decoding, and (3) critical probing. The thematic investigation phase seeks to detect the generative topics with regard to interactions between people and society, within a given culture context. Generative themes are the topics or issues that are raised through the process of dialog. The presence of a code allows the representation to be converted into signals (encoded) that can be transformed into representations (decoded).” [Louise Bennett, Michael Bergin, and John S. G. Wells, “The potential of critical social theory as an educational framework for people with epilepsy.” Epilepsy & Behavior. Volume 54, January 2016. Pages 80-87.]

“Genomic research has seen significant growth in the United States and, while genomics is still a relatively young endeavor, the technology exists to approach a variety of questions, such as the association between genetics and disease, genotypic and phenotypic expressions of certain disease states, and genetic variations across populations. A significant benefit of genomic research is the identification of opportunities to improve health, prevent disease, and appropriately treat the population as a whole. When incidental findings (IFs) of genomic research are uncovered by the researcher, significant ethical implications exist with disclosure of the IFs to research participants. Incidental findings in genomic research are an emerging concern as genome-wide research expands, introducing complex ethical issues for researchers. The ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, and maleficence must be considered when addressing disclosure of IFs from genomic research. The purpose of this article is to explore the ethical implications of the disclosure of IFs to genomic research participants. Utilizing critical social theory (CST) as a guide, we will discuss and critique the ethical principles associated with disclosure of IFs and examine the implications for nursing.” [Jeffrey L. Bevan, Julia N. Senn-Reeves, Ben R. Inventor, and Shawna M. Greiner and Karen M. Mayer, “Critical social theory approach to disclosure of genomic incidental findings.” Nursing Ethics. Volume 19, number 6, November 2012. Pages 819-828.]

“American leftists and liberals have a familiar script to read from in times like these, and initially many of us returned to it in reaction to [U.S. President Barack] Obama’s vacillation. In one respect, both left antiimperialists and liberal humanitarian interventionists have a similar critique of American foreign policy, as it is traditionally practiced: democracy and human rights abroad are perpetually sacrificed in the service of the “national interest.” Liberal interventionists tend to believe that narrow calculations of American interest should be supplemented with a more idealistic commitment to universal humanitarian norms, while anti-imperialists argue that such idealism is itself typically a cover for the projection of imperial power, and that the best thing America can do for the countries of the periphery is to stop meddling in their affairs. Either way, Obama’s response failed to measure up and both critiques could be heard in the midst of events in Egypt.” [Peter Frase, “The Superman Conditional: anti-imperialism after empire ….” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 2, spring 2011. Pages 3-5.]

“What would constitute a non-reformist reform of intellectual property? The revolutionary overthrow of all intellectual property, even if it were possible, leaves unanswered the question of how to ensure that those who create knowledge and culture are provided for, and how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists. The anarchist championing of online piracy only allows for some resistance around the edges, without posing a fundamental challenge to the system. And yet the idea of reforming IP [intellectual property] into something better and more egalitarian, something that truly rewards all who participate in the work of creation, seems like another iteration of the naïve dream of a just and democratic capitalism.” [Peter Frase, “Property and Theft.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 11̵12, fall 2013. Pages 4-7.]

“They had a lot of tricknology, AHA [Atlanta Housing Authority] did.…

“Tricknology is the word she [Shirley Hightower] used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where ‘you didn’t know you were poor.’ But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.…

“… Strangely, in Atlanta, Chicago, and elsewhere, public housing residents have ‘chosen’ their way out of their homes, neighborhoods, and social networks, away from transportation, jobs, doctors, grocery stores, schools, and relatives. They have ‘chosen’ their way into low-income neighborhoods on the margins of these cities, into exhausting commutes and feuding gang territories. How did it all happen? Tricknology.”

[Maya Dukmasova, “Tricknology 101.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 15–16, fall 2014. Pages 19-29.]

“The Living’s ideas about the architecture of the future are thus tightly bound up with ideas about the future of the economy: as buildings and their cities become living things integrated into a ‘natural cycle,’ the economy can become a continuously regenerating, self-sustaining loop rather than a unidirectional drain. Yet in crucial ways, this vision of the future economy doesn’t look so different from the old one. The parts that make up living buildings aren’t necessarily any less commodified than ‘dead’ forms like lumber and coal.

“Just as the scope of the metropolis stretches beyond city limits, urban politics are bound up not only in struggles over zoning or development, but in the resources that fuel city life and definitions of property and ownership that have evolved in the context of corporate labs and factory farms.”

[Alyssa Battistoni, “Nature’s Metropolis: Experiments in design promise a better future for everyone, but only if they come with emancipatory politics to boot.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 15–16, fall 2014. Pages 103-112.]

“Power and governance are located at multiple points in the smartphone chain, and production and design are deeply integrated at the global scale. But the new configurations of power tend to reinforce existing wealth hierarchies: poor and middle-income countries try desperately to move into more lucrative nodes through infrastructure development and trade deals, but upgrading opportunities are few and far between, and the global nature of production makes struggles by workers to improve conditions and wages extremely difficult.” [Nichole Aschoff, “The Smartphone Society: Just as the automobile defined the twentieth century, the smartphone is reshaping how we live and work today.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 17, spring 2015. Pages 35-41.]

“The firing and disciplining of teachers is also an ideological choice: teachers threaten the ruling class. Though they are atomized as workers into separate classrooms and competing districts, teachers are, as Beverly Silver puts it, strategically located in the social division of labor. If they don’t go to work, no one can — or at least, no one with children to look after. As caretakers, teachers are by definition important and trusted community figures, public care workers who can shut down private production.” [Megan Erickson, “Edutopia: Education is not a design problem with a technical solution. It’s a social and political project neoliberals want to innovate away.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 17, spring 2015. Pages 51-66.]

“There’ evidence all around us that we are at the beginning of a new era of mass protests. An era that might be similar in some ways to previous ones in American history: the uprising that powered the War of Independence, the abolitionist crusade that led to the Civil War and the “new birth of freedom,” the great labor upheavals of the 1930s that gave us mass industrial unions and what we have of a welfare state, and the Black Freedom movement and protests against the Vietnam War decades later.

“None of these protest eras have been exclusively American. The currents of emancipatory thinking that fueled the American Revolution also fueled the French Revolution; abolitionism spanned the Atlantic; the European protesters of 1968 were inspired by sncc; and protests against the Vietnam War spread across the globe.”

[Frances Fox Piven, “The New Protest Era: We are at the beginning of a new period of mass protests that will reshape American politics.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 14, spring 2014. Pages 7-9.]

“We need to get down to the work of building a radical civil society: forging social and organizational ‘infrastructures of dissent,’ developing our capacities to understand the world and articulate a compelling alternative moral and political vision, and linking these resources to a dynamic social base.

“Since its inception, Jacobin has sought to play a role in this process by creating an intellectual space for socialists across organizational boundaries.…

“But beyond what our small project can achieve, the next step for the broader Left is to establish relationships between promising political projects and bring questions of strategy back to the center of radical politics.”

[Editor, “Power Play.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 14, spring 2014. Pages 4-6.]

“‘Politics’ here means all that bears on the attempt to order social relations in the light of conceptions of human possibility: it is the continuing activity of trying to refine and give practical effect to such conceptions within a field of conflict. ‘Politics is the struggle to determine the totality of social relations in a given space.’ Cultural criticism’s complaints against current versions of politics in the narrower sense are then held to be part of a broader ‘logic’ wherein it is attempting to displace politics in the second, larger sense.…

“Most of everyday social activity is necessarily and rightly ‘instrumental’ and ‘partial’ in these senses. Their opposites, various forms of nonpractical creative and reflective activity which, in turn, enable a degree of ‘standing back’ from instrumentality, are exceptional; and such standing back is, I argue, one of the defining marks of what is usually termed ‘cultural criticism.’”

[Stefan Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism.” New Left Review. Series II, number 18, November–December 2002. Pages 73-97.]

“The semantic field encompassed by the single term ‘culture’ is now so large and so complex, and possessed of such a tangled history, that it may no longer be really practicable to attempt to treat it as a single topic. The very existence of the plural, ‘cultures,’ signifies a radically different subject-matter from that designated by what some, often defensively, always self-consciously, call ‘Culture with a capital C.’ The adjectival forms throw further fat on the fire: the business of a cultural attaché may have nothing in common with that of a professor of Cultural Studies; ‘cultural criticism’ as practised by a descendant of the Frankfurt School will bear little resemblance to that carried on by a broadsheet theatre-reviewer.” [Stefan Collini, “Culture Talk.” New Left Review. Series II, number 7, January–February 2001. Pages 43-53.]

“[Stefan] Collini begins by relieving the phrase ‘cultural criticism’ of its everyday ambiguity. It is not, or not only, criticism of culture. Culture is what animates and orients the critical practice, whose object is society or, better, ‘prevailing public discourse.’ This is culture as ‘artistic and intellectual activities’—not the only meaning of the term, he agrees, but, as Raymond Williams recognized, the ‘primary’ one. The criticism it underwrites is politically modest in ambition and effect, not driven as metacultural discourse supposedly is, and certainly not fated to reactionary conclusions. ‘Distance,’ ‘reflectiveness’ and generality are its defining critical qualities.” [Francis Mulhern, “What is Cultural Criticism?” New Left Review. Series II, number 23, September–October 2003. Pages 35-49.]

“The thesis of this book is that it is not to the corporate sector that one must look to find the roots of modern international economic relations as much as to U.S. Government pressure on central banks and on multilateral organizations such as the IMF [International Monetary Fund], World Bank and World Trade Organization. Already in the aftermath of World War I, but especially since the end of World War II, intergovernmental lending and debt relationships among the world’s central banks have overshadowed the drives of private sector capital.

“At the root of this new form of imperialism is the exploitation of governments by a single government, that of the United States, via the central banks and multilateral control institutions of intergovernmental capital rather than via the activities of private corporations seeking profits. What has turned the older forms of imperialism into a super imperialism is that whereas prior to the 1960s the U.S. Government dominated international organizations by virtue of its preeminent creditor status, since that time it has done so by virtue of its debtor position.”

[Michael Hudson. Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press. 2003. Pages 23-24.]

“It is quite possible that historians of the 2050s, looking back into our now closing [twentieth] century, will pick out, as one deep tectonic movement stretching across more than two centuries, the disintegration of the great polyethnic, polyglot, and often polyreligious monarchical empires built up so painfully in mediaeval and early modern times.…

“… [One] way in which the market is making a special contribution to the new world disorder, and it intersects frequently with the upheavals sketched out above.… The great munitions industries were now in the business of supplying their core customers with the most advanced and expensive war machinery possible, but also selling off obsolescent, cheaper lines of goods on the world market.…

“… despite the end of the Cold War, dangerous convergences that were already born in the last century show every sign of continuing to develop: market-led proliferation of weapons-systems, mythologization of militaries as sine qua non symbols and guarantors of national sovereignty, and ethnicization of officer corps.”

[Benedict Anderson, “The New World Disorder.” New Left Review. Series I, number 193, May–June 1992. Pages 3-13.]

“The aim of this article is to present a conceptualization of cultural groups and cultural difference that provides a middle course between the Scylla of essentialism and the Charybdis of reductionism. The method I employ is the social mechanism approach. I argue that cultural groups and cultural difference should be understood as the result of cognitive and social processes of categorization. I describe two such processes in particular: categorization by others and self-categorization. Categorization by others is caused by processes of ascription: the attribution by outsiders of certain characteristics, beliefs, and practices to individuals who share a specific attribute. Self-categorization is caused by processes of inscription and community-building: the adoption of certain beliefs and practices as a result of socialization and enculturation.” [Roland Pierik, “Conceptualizing cultural groups and cultural difference: The social mechanism approach.” Ethnicities. Volume 4, number 4, 2004. Pages 523-544.]

“… in order to develop the mechanisms approach beyond the mere mechanisms talk, there is a need for explicit consideration of what organizational mechanisms actually are, how they work, and what it means to explain by mechanisms.…

“Since the prospects for the mechanisms approach in the social sciences are thought to be promising, researchers have also started to consider how we could actually identify and examine mechanisms.”

[Kalle Pajunen, “The Nature of Organizational Mechanisms.” Organization Studies. Volume 29, number 11, 2008. Pages 1449-1468.]

“Increasing calls from scholars for reorienting inquiry to focus on addressing social inequities have emerged within critical qualitative inquiry and health sciences. In response, transformative scholarship has been taken up within contemporary frameworks to express a commitment to social justice. A critical analysis of guiding frameworks for transformative scholarship is essential in order to move away from approaches characterized by implicit or explicit positivist/postpositivist assumptions that often fail to question and thereby transform the status quo.…

“… at its core, transformative scholarship embodies a commitment to revealing unequal relations or conditions that cause injustices and altering such relations or conditions by promoting new viewpoints and possibilities for resistance and justice ….”

[Lisette Farias, Debbie Laliberte Rudman, Lilian Magalhães, and Denise Gastaldo, “Reclaiming the Potential of Transformative Scholarship to Enable Social Justice.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Volume 16, June 2017. Pages 1-10.]

“… [Transformative] scholarship is conducive to Navajo society and distinct to the academy.…

“Indigenous education can help Indigenous students learn about Native America and their peoples’ place in this world that is consistent with Indigenous values and worldviews. The summer program also stresses how Indigenous students can use higher education tools to serve the goals and needs of Indigenous communities. This article is an example of how Navajo transformative scholarship can be employed by Indigenous programs and institutions to reclaim and restore cultural teachings that will, in effect, decolonize young students’ minds.”

[Lloyd L. Lee, “Navajo Transformative Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century.” Wicazo Sa Review. Volume 25, number 1, spring 2010. Pages 33-45.]

“The acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is often represented as a disease of the ‘other’ because of associations through HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) risk factors such as drug use, same-sex activity, and prostitution …. In the United States, public attitudes toward HIV are based on an ethos of personal responsibility, and failure to avoid being infected often leads to negative judgments about people who are living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA [people living with HIV/AIDS]) …. Educators are compelled to go beyond this conceptualization to demonstrate how and why differential patterns of HIV risk occur. This focus presents a classroom challenge for two reasons: This focus presents a classroom challenge because teaching about HIV requires an examination of commonly held prejudices and stereotypes, including those of students who are taking the class.” [Bronwen Lichtenstein, “Making It Real Through Transformative Scholarship, Service-Learning, and a Community-Based Partnership for HIV Education in Alabama.” JCES: Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship. Volume 6, number 2, summer 2013. Pages 25-36.]

“In this article, my aim is to provide conceptual guidelines for a thoughtful incorporation of direct ecological impact, alongside socially constructed nature, into research on organizations and the natural environment. For this I first need to establish that a distinction between direct and indirect ecological impact can be made.… Next, I build on the social mechanism approach from analytical sociology … to provide a conceptual framework of socio-ecological mechanisms for organization studies. I conclude this article with reflections on the relative importance of direct ecological impact and consequences for organization studies. Throughout, my main ambition is to provide food for thought for scholars interested in the ways in which organizations are embedded in natural ecosystems.” [Frank Boons, “Organizing Within Dynamic Ecosystems: Conceptualizing Socio-Ecological Mechanisms.” Organization & Environment. Volume 26, number 3, 2013. Pages 281–297.]

“I prefer to think of the conception of explanation that emerges from these considerations as causal/mechanical. The aim of explanations of this sort is to exhibit the ways in which nature operates; it is an effort to lay bare the mechanisms that underlie the phenomena we observe and wish to explain.…

“… We can explain why metals are conductors in terms of the behavior of their electrons. And so it goes from the particular fact to the more general laws until we finally reach the most comprehensive available theory. The causal/mechanical approach has the same sort of bottom-up quality. From relatively superficial causal explanations of particular facts we appeal to ever more general types of mechanisms until we reach the most ubiquitous mechanisms that operate in the universe.”

[Wesley C. Salmon. Causality and Explanation. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pages 71-72.]

“I believe that it is important to look for mechanisms, but I am convinced that the mechanisms of the quantum domain—which may well be noncausal—are very different from those that operate on a macroscopic scale. Given that I now believe that the causal/mechanical and unification conceptions are complementary, I certainly do not maintain that ‘we should abandon epistemic conceptions.’” [Wesley C. Salmon. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2006. Kindle edition.]

“I have frequently used the example of a rotating spotlight in the center of a circular building to illustrate the difference between causal processes and pseudo processes. A brief pulse of light traveling from the beacon to the wall is a causal process. If you place a red filter in its path the light pulse becomes red and remains red from the point of insertion to the wall without any further intervention. The spot of light that travels around the wall is a pseudo process. You can make the white spot red by intervening at the wall where the light strikes it, but without further local intervention it will not remain red as it passes beyond the point of intervention. Thus, causal processes transmit marks but pseudo processes do not.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Causality without Counterfactuals.” Philosophy of Science. Volume 61, number 2, June 1994. Pages 297-312.]

“I realize, of course, that problem-solving can have great practical value in many cases; obviously we are rightly concerned to solve puzzles concerning the causes of airplane crashes in order to try to prevent future accidents. My interest in this paper is, however, mainly in pure rather thad applied science; the aim is to characterize the kind of intellectual understanding we can achieve, for example, from knowledge of basic aerodynamic principles.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “The Value of Scientific Understanding.” Philosophica. Volume 51, number 1, 1993. Pages 9-19.]

“One of the fundamental changes which I propose in approaching causality is to take processes rather than events as basic entities. I shall not attempt any rigorous definition of processes; rather, I shall cite examples and make some very informal remarks. The main difference between events and processes is that events are relatively localized in space and time, while processes have much greater temporal duration, and in many cases, much greater spatial extent. In spacetime diagrams, events are represented by points, while processes are represented by lines.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Causality: Production and Propagation.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Volume 1980, 1980. Pages 49-69.]

“Non-causal regularities, instead of having explanatory force which enables them to provide understanding of events in the world, cry out to be explained. Mariners, long before [Isaac] Newton, were fully aware of the correlation between the behavior of the tides and the position and phase of the moon. But inasmuch as they were totally ignorant of the causal relations involved, they rightly believed that they did not understand why the tides ebb and flow. When Newton provided the gravi- tational links, understanding was achieved.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Why Ask, ‘Why?’? An Inquiry concerning Scientific Explanation.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. Volume 51, number 6, August 1978. Pages 683-705.]

“The essential ingredients in a satisfactory qualitative theory of probabilistic causality are, it seems to me: (1) a fundamental distinction between causal processes and causal interactions, (2) an account of the propagation of causal influence via causal processes, (3) an account of causal interactions in terms of interactive forks, (4) an account of causal directionality in terms of conjunctive forks, and (5) an account of causal betweenness in terms of causal processes and causal directionality.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Probabilistic Causality.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Volume 61, 1980. Pages 50-74.]

“There is a fundamental intuition—shared, I believe, by almost everyone who thinks seriously about the matter—according to which causality is intimately involved in explanation. Those who are familiar with [David] Hume’s critique of causality may deny the validity of that intuition by constructing noncausal theories of scientific explanation. Others may skirt the issue by claiming that the concept of causality is clear enough already, and that further analysis is unnecessary. My own view is (1) that the intuition is valid—scientific explanation does involve causality in an extremely fundamental fashion—and (2) that causal concepts do stand in serious need of further analysis.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Scientific Explanation: Three Basic Conceptions.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Volume 1984, 1984. Pages 293-305.]

“The aim is to distinguish between processes that are causal and those that are not (causal processes vs. pseudo-processes) and to distinguish those intersections of processes (whether causal or pseudo) that are genuine causal interactions and those that are not.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Scientific Explanation: Causation and Unification.” Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia. Volume XXII, number 66, December 1990. Pages 3-23.]

“If we are going to talk about preference among generalisations, then we have to be quite explicit about the purpose for which the generalisation is to be used. In this context, we are discussing prediction, so the preference must be in relation to predictive capability. As [Karl] Popper rightly insists, any generalisation we choose will have predictive import in the sense that it will make statements about future events—more precisely, in a predictive argument as characterised above, it yields conclusions about future occurrences.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “Rational Prediction.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Volume 32, number 2, June 1981. Pages 115-125.]

“It seems to me that causal processes can do the needed job without attributing time asymmetry to them. Basically, I believe, we can use symmetric causal processes to distinguish conjunctive forks representing genuine common cause configurations from those that do not.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “The Causal Structure of the World.” Metatheoria: Revista de Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia. Volume 1, number 1, 2011. Pages 1-13.]

“The at-at theory of mark transmission provides, I believe, an acceptable basis for the mark method, which can in turn serve as the means to distinguish causal processes from pseudo-processes. Causal processes play a fundamental role in physical theory, and as [Bertrand] Russell correctly observed, their existence has profound epistemological significance. Causal processes are, of course, governed by natural laws; these laws constitute regularities whose presence can be empirically confirmed.” [Wesley C. Salmon, “An ‘At-At’ Theory of Causal Influence.” Philosophy of Science. Volume 44, number 2, June 1977. Pages 215-224.]

“It must be … [said] that, where possible, [Wesley C.] Salmon’s theory of mechanistic explanation can be applied only if not interpreted literally, in a strict sense, but as referring to incomplete mechanisms. In order to make his theory more widely applicable and to get closer to the actual elaboration of explanations in scientific practice—and only for these purposes—Salmon came to admit that the level of graininess of a mechanistic description and the context in which it is drawn play a relevant role.” [Raffaella Campaner, “Mechanistic and Neo-mechanistic Accounts of Causation: How Salmon Already Got (Much of) It Right.” Metatheoria: Revista de Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia. Volume 3, number 2, 2013. Pages 81-98.]

“What is important for our purposes is that real essentialism, whilst incorporating into its definitions whatever correct science has to offer about the inner structures of things, takes all objects, from the very big to the very small, at face value. This means that the qualitative characteristics of things are held to be a real part of ontology, not mere epiphenomena of, or expressions of, or reducible to, the underlying quantitative characteristics of things given by a mathematical theory, no matter how predictively and explanatorily successful the mathematical theory may be.

“Secondly, real essentialism does not privilege the microscopic over the macroscopic, unless the object of investigation is specifically the microscopic. Taking the macroscopic seriously is shown in the very form of the real essentialist definition, which gives both the genus and the specific difference, for example: ‘Water is a colourless, odourless substance in liquid, solid or gaseous form that …’; ‘Gold is a soft, shiny, yellow, heavy, malleable, ductile metal that …’; ‘A fish is a cold-blooded, water-dwelling animal that ….’ Again, it is not important for present purposes whether the definition is exact. The point is that, unless we are speaking specifically about the microscopic, the macroscopic always figures in a real essentialist definition, either in the genus, or in the specific difference, or both.”

[David S. Oderberg. Real Essentialism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Pages 15-16.]

“I do not propose to pursue hidden structure essentialism here. My concern is with the need for the essentialist to make a rigid distinction between the essence of a thing and those characteristics of the object that are, in a sense to be clarified later, tied to the essence. Whether or not the essence is an internal structure, what it cannot be is simply some privileged group, set, or bundle of ‘essential properties.’ The main reason is what I call the ‘unity problem’: if the essence is a group (set, bundle) of properties, what holds those properties together?” [David S. Oderberg, “Essence and Properties.” Erkenntnis (1975-). Volume 75, number 1, July 2011. Pages 85-111.]

“David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism is an extended defence of the traditional Aristotelian idea that everything has an essence.…

“In sum, Oderberg’s Real Essentialism is a thought-provoking and wide-ranging book arguing for the intriguing thesis that essence is to be situated within a hylomorphic metaphysical framework. In his attempt to cover so much ground, however, Oderberg often fails to fill in the details of his arguments. This leaves one unable to engage with the interesting sub ject matter of Oderberg’s work as much as one would have liked.”

[M. Eddon, “Real Essentialism.” Review article. Mind. Volume 119, number 476, October 2010. Pages 1210-1212.]

“The book moves from very general metaphysical and epistemological problems concerning the nature and knowability of essence, through more specific issues in ontology concerning substance, matter, form, identity, existence, powers, laws, accidents and properties, and finally to the application of hylemorphic essentialism to questions in the philosophy of nature, especially in the field of biology. The long chapter on biological species, which is extremely well informed from a scientific point of view, is in itself a major contribution to the metaphysics of biology, pre- senting an important challenge to much contemporary scientific and philosophical thought concerning biological taxonomy. The book ends with a chapter on human personhood, defending once more an Aristotelian dualism of matter and form, quite opposed to any kind of neo-Cartesian psychophysical dualism but equally opposed to mainstream contemporary physicalism in the philosophy of mind.” [E. J. Lowe, “Real Essentialism.” Review article. The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-). Volume 60, number 240, July 2010. Pages 648-652.]

“So far, in the evolutionary naturalist realist epistemology and methodology I am developing, I have made only two claims about the nature of reality. The first is that reality exists independently of our knowledge of it. The second is that everything that exists is in principle interconnectable with everything else that exists. The connections between things are called causal connections. Causation is, in this sense, a primitive. These ontological claims do not so much constitute an ontology as form constraints on an ontology. They leave open the nature of the causally connected world.

“But the concepts of evolutionary epistemology that form the basis of the notion of validity that I have developed will take us a little further. The foundation of evolutionary theory is natural selection. Organisms evolve in interaction with the environment, and their perceptual/cognitive systems are such that they maintain a passable fit between an organism and its environment—one that allows for the survival and reproduction of the organism. It follows that the nature of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms themselves (and not only human ones) carries some information about the nature of reality.”

[Jane Azevedo. Mapping Reality: An Evolutionary Realist Methodology for the Natural and Social Sciences. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1997. Page 182.]

“The recent illuminating discussions of functional psychology make it opportune to indicate some of the metaphysical counterparts of this method as embodied in that form of monisin which is most appropriately termed dynamic realism. It would consume too much of the time courteously extended to me by the editor for this purpose to indicate how generally (albeit not always consciously) this tendency in philosophy has permeated recent literature, but none can deny a notable advance in this direction during the last ten years.

“The extension of the term ‘functional’ into philosophy may be deprecated as bringing an assumption into a sphere whose chief glory it is to avoid all postulates which have not been critically examined. ‘Dynamic,’ as descriptive of a form of realism, seems more happy in that it agrees with the psychological idea that conscious processes are always a ‘doing’ but does not drag in, even by a form of popular allusion, the thought of something behind which is ‘functioning.’ It may be the claim of realism to escape as long possible from preinterpretations, whether of science or of philosophy.”

[C. L. Herrick, “Fundamental Concepts and Methodology of Dynamic Realism.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Volume 1, number 11, May 1904. Pages 281-288.]

“… what we mean by dynamic realism stands for the view that all parts of the universe are reciprocally bound together because they act together and have grown to be what they are in organic unity of development. Pragmatism is then justifiable in so far as it refers to a methodological concept. That things do work together and our needs are satisfied when a certain set of postulates are conformed to, is, in so far forth, evidence of the correctness of the postulates, but this is only evidence that by this means we have discovered a part of the organic harmony covered by the law of congruousness. The theory is not true because it satisfies our needs, but the fact that it satisfies our needs is evidence that the theory fits into the organism.

“Realism is not satisfied with one aspect only of being, but accepts the fact of reaction as evidence of the other by the reaction of which with self realization becomes possible.”

[C. L. Herrick, “The Law of Congruousness and its Logical Application to Dynamic Realism.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Volume 1, number 22, October 1904. Pages 595-603.]

“When we can explain chemical affinity we may attempt to explain instinct; when we have explained instinct we may attempt intelligence. The explanation offered by dynamic realism of the ‘meaning’ of the simplest of natural phenomena will presumptively be the explanation of the principle underlying all reactions.

“We may ask why a comet pursues a given course rather than another. The answer is two-fold. First, because of the nature of the forces constituting the comet; second, by reason of the combinations of energy existing in the universe through which it passes. In other words, the trajectory of the comet is determined by correspondences existing between the comet and its environment. We might say that the trajectory of the comet is its path of least resistance, but this is only part of the truth. The nature of the energic structure of the comet is also a factor—the most important one. It has, we say, a certain mass of gravity. It has that which makes it a positive energic element in a universe of energy. It might be considered fanciful to suppose that as the extrinsic pull which draws the mother to her child has also its intrinsic side called affection, so there is an intrinsic affection corresponding to the extrinsic pull of the planet. Nevertheless, all analogy would indicate that, if not an affection or instinct, there is nevertheless an intrinsic element in all these cases.”

[C. L. Herrick, “Genetic Modes and the Meaning of the Psychic.” Psychological Review. Volume 14, number 1, January 1907. Pages 54-59.]

“In a premodern world, separate groups might develop singular cultures, but in highly organized American society the maintenance of unique cultures is improbable; neither the means nor the requisite isolation exist.…

“To put this sharply: America’s multiple ‘cultures’ exist within a single consumer society. Professional sports, Hollywood movies, automobiles, designer clothes, name-brand sneakers, television and videos, commercial music and CDs [compact discs] pervade America’s multiculturalism. These ‘cultures’ live, work and dream in the same society. Chicanos, like Chinese-Americans, want to hold good jobs, live in the suburbs, and drive well-engineered cars.…

“Amid the interminable discussions on multiculturalism virtually no one admits that the diverse ‘cultures’ do not offer any real alternative to American life, leisure or business.”

[Russell Jacoby, “The Myth of Multiculturalism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 208, November–December 1994. Pages 121-126.]

“This paper 1) critiques the NGLS [New Global Labour Studies] for its social-liberal parameters, concentrating on the supra-national or global level, spaces, sites or aspects. It argues 2) the necessity for an ‘Emancipatory Global Labour Studies’ (EGLS) and suggests some possible theoretical sources of such. It presents 3) some cases for research on labour(-related) social movements with hypothetically emancipatory potential. It considers 4) information technology and cyberspace as a crucial new agora of labour struggle and a crucial resource for movement-oriented international labour studies.…

“In suggesting that ‘another global labour studies is necessary,’ I am playing with and expanding on the early slogan of the World Social Forum, ‘Another World is Possible!,’ a slogan that at least opened up the imagination to the possibility of a world beyond not only paleo-liberalism but also capitalism. Let me here suggest as a name for my alternative, ‘Emancipatory Global Labour Studies’. This would provide the acronym EGLS (pronounce: ‘eagles’).… [T]he NGLS, with its limited parameters, goes wider than one book and one exchange in one journal.”

[Peter Waterman, “An Emancipatory Global Labour Studies is Necessary!: On Rethinking the Global Labour Movement in the Hour of Furnaces.” Research paper 49. International Institute of Social History. 2012. Pages 1-43.]

“To appeal to universalism as a way of asserting the superiority of Western culture is to betray universality, but to appeal to universalism as a way of dismantling the superiority of the West is to realize it.…

“If there is today a global canon of universalism, it consists of documentary traces of past struggles in which oppression was resisted in the name of universal values. Like all canons, that of universalism is selective, and easily turned into a new instrument of oppression. Inevitably, every coding of universality is a particular representation. Universality, once represented, transforms itself into some more or less doctrinaire version of universalism, of which there exist a great number of varieties.…

“… the ideology of universalism makes it easy to depict anything that obstructs the globalization process, or the capitalist production of uniformity, as an infringement on human rights, or as an obstruction of freedom as such.”

[Stefan Jonsson, “The Ideology of Universalism.” New Left Review. Series II, number 63, May–June 2010. Pages 115-126.]

“The replacement of painting by photography was … [a] path to the rationalization of art, one that employed an ideological signifier of objectivity, impersonality, and machine technology, the camera, to achieve a rapprochement with the academic Realism that had gained official favor. The move of Russian modernist artists to photography, propaganda, and advertising was, in the words of one historian, ‘at once a symptom and a cause of the decline of Constructivism’ as an artistic program, ‘and of its increasing compromise with existing, as opposed to projected, reality.’ While art historians who see the Constructivists as tragically frustrated social revolutionaries are loath to admit it, these artists were only submitting to the party dictatorship to whose triumph their earlier work had meant to contribute.” [Paul Mattick, Jr. Art in Its Time: Theories and practices of modern aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 85.]

“‘This is the Revelation given by God to Jesus Christ. It was given to him so that he might show his servants what must shortly happen.’ Thus commences the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of John.…

“… Instead of a revolutionary transition from Western capitalism to Soviet socialism, as hoped or feared by many, the world as a whole seems to be in the process of transformation. Ancient historians are thus drawing new paradigms for their discipline. The same texts are being read in a different way, leading to different conclusions. [Friedrich] Engels and [Max] Weber are both seen to have been wrong: early Christianity could have been strongly influenced by social conditions and at the same time immune from the interests of slaves and proletarians. Class conflicts may have been in antiquity as important as they are now without the ancient world following the pattern of general crisis–revolution–transition. Long-term historical evolution needs to be redefined, and the location of religion in late antiquity reexamined.”

[Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, “Revelation Revised.” New Left Review. Series I, number 190, November–December 1991. Pages 131-137.]

“Identity groups were certainly not central to the Left. Basically, the mass social and political movements of the Left, that is, those inspired by the American and French revolutions and socialism, were indeed coalitions or group alliances, but held together not by aims that were specific to the group, but by great, universal causes through which each group believed its particular aims could be realized: democracy, the Republic, socialism, communism or whatever. Our own Labour Party [UK] in its great days was both the party of a class and, among other things, of the minority nations and immigrant communities of mainland Britainians. It was all this, because it was a party of equality and social justice.…

“So what does identity politics have to do with the Left? Let me state firmly what should not need restating. The political project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings.…

“That is why the Left cannot base itself on identity politics. It has a wider agenda. For the Left, Ireland was, historically, one, but only one, out of the many exploited, oppressed and victimized sets of human beings for which it fought. For the ira kind of nationalism, the Left was, and is, only one possible ally in the fight for its objectives in certain situations. In others it was ready to bid for the support of [Adolf] Hitler as some of its leaders did during World War II. And this applies to every group which makes identity politics its foundation, ethnic or otherwise.

“Now the wider agenda of the Left does, of course, mean it supports many identity groups, at least some of the time, and they, in turn look to the Left. Indeed, some of these alliances are so old and so close that the Left is surprised when they come to an end, as people are surprised when marriages break up after a lifetime.”

[Eric Hobsbawm, “Identity Politics and the Left.” New Left Review. Series I, number 217, May–June 1996. Pages 38-47.]

“I have been asked to speak on ‘the crisis of ideology, culture and civilization’ today—an enormous subject, and one not easy to define.…

“The events of recent years have indeed been spectacular and worldchanging—and also unexpected and unpredicted. Yet the revolutionary nature of the period we have been—we are still—living through goes far beyond those changes in global politics which are now making it impossible for cartographers to prepare atlases that will not be out of date in a matter of months. Never before in history has ordinary human life, and the societies in which it takes place, been so radically transformed in so short a time: not merely within a single lifetime, but within part of a lifetime.”

[Eric Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies.” New Left Review. Series I, number 192, March–April 1992. Pages 55-64.]

“At this point, we know very little about nonhumans’ reactions to inequitable or unequal situations. Thus, prior to discussions of fairness, we must first investigate the species’ reactions to personal equity and inequity and determine the species’ conventions relating to fairness. We also have not yet begun to address how individuals may come to violate fairness norms in these species in the first place. Thus, in order to be consistent throughout this review I will use the term ‘inequity response’ when referring to animals, and suggest its use in the future to cover the entire broad group of responses to inequity. This emphasizes the fact that in many cases involving nonhumans it is a response, or behavior, to an inequitable situation that is being studied, and not necessarily fairness in the sense usually intended in the human social psychology literature.…

“We can learn a great deal about ourselves by examining other species. In other species, we see a mirror of ourselves stripped of the complications of language and complex culture so we can learn more about our innate responses to inequity.”

[Sarah F. Brosnan, “Nonhuman Species’ Reactions to Inequity and their Implications for Fairness.” Social Justice Research. Volume 19, number 2, June 2006. Pages 153-185.]

“… questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them. I shall call this the problem of displacement. Second, today’s recognition struggles are occurring at a moment of hugely increasing transcultural interaction and communication, when accelerated migration and global media flows are hybridizing and pluralizing cultural forms. Yet the routes such struggles take often serve not to promote respectful interaction within increasingly multicultural contexts, but to drastically simplify and reify group identities. They tend, rather, to encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism and authoritarianism. I shall call this the problem of reification.” [Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition.” New Left Review. Series II, number 3, May–June 2000. Pages 107-120.]

“Although there are significant differences between post-identity theories, many of them share an anti-recognition stance insofar as they argue that a politics of recognition inevitably (i) entrenches normalizing forms of identity that ultimately sustain, rather than challenge and eradicate, social inequality, oppression and domination; and (ii) maintains the problematic ideal of authentic, unified and autonomous selfhood. Consequently, post-identity thinkers argue that radical social change can best (or only) be enacted if we move beyond recognition politics through the embrace of gender identities that are in some sense unrecognizable from the perspective of our current, shared conceptual framework. Only in this way can we challenge the oppressive norms that are embedded in normative accounts of sex and gender identity and create a future that diverges significantly from the present. This, in turn, can generate the kind of inclusive, pluralistic democratic sphere that can foster the social acceptance of difference and counteract deeply embedded social inequalities.” [Paddy McQueen, “Post-identity politics and the social weightlessness of radical gender theory.” Thesis Eleven. Volume 134, number 1, 2016. Pages 73-88.]

“The introduction of analyses of discourse and difference raise our awareness of the range of meanings and contestations that are involved in a ‘community.’ Development of questions about who is constructing notions of ‘community’ and what ideas are assembled under the term appear fruitful ways forward for critical community studies. So too, the increased attention to multiply configured identities, places and spaces, highlights how ‘community’ is enacted in contexts embedded within social imaginations and networks. Geographies of ‘community’ may be traced across both material and metaphoric spaces so that neither the tangible or imaginary aspects are forgotten.

“This paper has proposed that a useful concept of ‘community’ is one which recognises the variable terrains of power and discourse shaping the contextual ground in which the notion germinates.”

[Ruth Liepins, “New energies for an old idea: reworking approaches to ‘community’ in contemporary rural studies.” Journal of Rural Studies. Volume 16, issue 1, January 2000. Pages 23-35.]

“… my main concern in this essay is activated by an analysis of the ways through which ideologies of difference are produced in the West. An aesthetic theory of world music as cultural critique therefore cannot heroize 0therness. And, by the same token, it cannot engage in, say, the sort of influential anthropological project that attempts to bring ‘the insights gained on the periphery back to the center to raise havoc with our settled ways of thinking and conceptualization.’ …

“World music … is not the new music of the ‘non-western world,’ let alone of the disenfranchised Third World ‘lumpen proletariat.’ Rather, world music seems to be the aesthetic figure corresponding most closely to what [Jean] Baudrillard has called the ‘fractal stage of value,’ a historical moment in which value is no longer dependent on the natural use of the world, nor on a logic of commodity exchange or a structural web of signs. Value, in the viral stage, develops from pure contiguity, from the cancerous proliferation of values without any reference point at all.”

[Veit Erlmann, “The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s.” Public Culture. Volume 8, number 3, spring 1996. Pages 467-487.]

“For anyone who works in the psychiatric field and who refuses to allow his critical awareness of what he is about to be numbed or engulfed by the institutionalizing processes of formal training and day-by-day indoctrination in the teaching hospital or psychiatric hospital, a number of disturbing questions arise. In this field most particularly, in the midst of people in extreme situations, one experiences the Zen ‘doubt sensation’—why am I here, who put me here, or why have I put myself here (and what is the difference between these questions), who is paying me for what, what shall I do, why do anything, why do nothing, what is anything and what is nothing, what is life and death, sanity and madness?

“To the institutional survivor none of the more or less glib customary answers to these questions seems adequate. The questioning extends into both the theoretical basis, such as it is, of one’s work and the precise daily operations—gestures, acts, statements in relation to actual other persons. A more profound questioning has led some of us to propose conceptions and procedures that seem quite antithetic to the conventional ones in fact what may be regarded as a germinal anti-psychiatry.

“The most effective way to explore the possibilities of such an antithetic discipline seems to me to be to investigate the major problem area of the discipline in question. In the case of psychiatry this problem area is that which is defined as schizophrenia.

“What I have attempted to do in this monograph is to take a look at the person who has been labelled schizophrenic in his actual human context and to enquire how this label came to be attached to him, by whom it was attached, and what it signifies both for the labellers and the labelled.”

[David Cooper. Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Page ix.]

“When I came back on a second visit to South America it took me several months to realize I was in the third world and to discover the meaning of the motto ‘The Third World first.’ My aim was to assist in the formation of anti-psychiatric communes and an international teaching-learning centre in the third world so that Europeans and North Americans would come here not to teach but to learn, thus helping attack cultural imperialism. Argentina is a favourable ground for this slow work firstly because its psychoanalytic tradition (e.g. [Enrique] Pichon-Rivière, Emilio Rodrigué, Marie Langer) breeds rebellion and breakaway groups; secondly because comradeship links are more extensive and lead to easier exitus from the nuclear family than in the first world; thirdly because after North America Argentina is perhaps the most heavily psychiatrized country in the world and lots of psychiatry makes for lots of anti-psychiatry; fourthly the fluid political scene makes for a good, usable, individual fluidity. I mention these matters because so much of the content of this book has been determined by my experiences in Argentina.” [David Cooper. The Grammar of Living. New York: Penguin Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 1974. Page 4.]

“The Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation was held in London at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm from 15 July to 30 July 1967. The present volume is a compilation of some of the principal addresses delivered on this occasion. I would like to outline in this brief introduction how the Congress came about and in particular why we, the organizers, arranged this meeting between these particular people, why we generated this curious pastiche of eminent scholars and political activists.

“The organizing group consisted of four psychiatrists who were very much concerned with radical innovation in their own field – to the extent of their counter-labelling their discipline as anti-psychiatry. The four were Dr R. D. Laing and myself, also Dr Joseph Berke and Dr Leon Redler. Our experience originated in studies into that predominant form of socially stigmatized madness that is called schizophrenia. Most people who are called mad and who are socially victimized by virtue of that attribution (by being ‘put away,’ being subjected to electric shocks, tranquillizing drugs, and brainslicing operations, and so on) come from family situations in which there is a desperate need to find some scapegoat, someone who will consent at a certain point of intensity in the whole transaction of the family group to take on the disturbance of each of the others and, in some sense, suffer for them. In this way the scapegoated person would become a diseased object in the family system and the family system would involve medical accomplices in its machinations. The doctors would be used to attach the label ‘schizophrenia’ to the diseased object and then systematically set about the destruction of that object by the physical and social processes that are termed ‘psychiatric treatment.’”

[David Cooper, “Introduction.” The Dialectics of Liberation. David Cooper, editor. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2015. Pages 5-9.]

“The ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement was a group of ex-psychiatric patients, as well as intellectuals and writers, who organized to advocate for more humane treatment of the mentally ill and to question the very concept of madness and the social control inherent in the psychiatric system. Gaining momentum during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, thinkers and writers of the movement suggested that doctors had been too keen to medicalize eccentric behaviour, inhibiting both individuality and unconventional thinking. As such, they were particularly critical of biological psychiatry, especially psychosurgeries, shock treatments, and psychotropic drugs …. At the same moment that the therapeutic impulse was becoming more diffuse in American society, in the form of alternative therapeutic practices and settings such as consciousness raising, leftist radical therapy, therapeutic communities, experimental wards, feminist clinical practices and therapy, as well as self-help, antipsychiatry offered a radical assessment of psychiatry broadly conceived as inherently repressive, belittling, and spirit-crushing ….” [Heather Murray, “‘My Place Was Set At The Terrible Feast’: The Meanings of the ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ Movement and Responses in the United States, 1970s-1990s.” The Journal of American Culture. Volume 37, number 1, March 2014. Pages 37-51.]

“When psychiatrists of a certain age and educational bent hear the phrase ‘anti-psychiatry,’ they probably recall the movement against the rebirth of biological psychiatry prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. Erving Goffman, Ph.D., Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., and Michel P. Foucault, among others, inspired a crusade among primarily liberal intellectuals to demythologize mental illness and liberate psychiatric patients from the forces of cultural labeling, dehumanizing institutionalization and a burgeoning psychopharmacology intended to medicalize deviance and control eccentricity. Edward Shorter, Ph.D., one of the foremost historians of psychiatry, aptly summarized the perspective of the anti-psychiatry forces …:

“The movement’s basic argument was that psychiatric illness is not medical in nature but social, political, and legal: Society defines what schizophrenia or depression is, and not nature. If psychiatric illness is thus socially constructed, it must be deconstructed in the interest of freeing deviants, free spirits, and exceptional creative people from the stigma of being ‘pathological.’”

[Cynthia M. A. Geppert, “The Anti-Psychiatry Movement Is Alive and Well.” Psychiatric Times. Volume 21, number 3, March 2004. Pages 21+.]

“The issue of voluntarism and its ramifications has been under constant discussion among ex-patient activists, but until recently their published literature and public statements emphasized consciousness raising and anti-psychiatric propaganda There is also a growing literature detailing the activities of various governmental agencies that have utilized psychiatrists in all sorts of clandestine human experiments. Also cited are the practice of sterilization, condoned by psychiatrists, of mental patients in the United States, and revelations of the leadership role of prominent German psychiatrists in the sterilization and murder of hundreds of thousands of mentally ill patients during the Nazi era, a subject overlooked in histories of psychiatry and largely ignored within the American psychiatric profession. Some critics even link American and German psychiatric abuses.” [Norman Dain, “Critics and Dissenters: Reflections on ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ in the United States.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Volume 25, number 1, January 1989. Pages 3-25.]

“The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. This is an important difference, even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience with both situations. I will begin with the situation of the discredited and move on to the discreditable but not always separate the two.

“Three grossly different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abominations of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behavior. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. In all of these various instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the claim that his other attributes have on us. He possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals.”

[Erving Goffman. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: A Touchstone Book imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1986. Pages 2-3.]

“A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and one example, mental hospitals, in particular. The main focus is on the world of the inmate, not the world of the staff. A chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self.” [Erving Goffman. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books imprint of Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1961. Page xiii.]

“Every institution captures something of the time and interest of its members and provides something of a world for them; in brief, every institution has encompassing tendencies. When we review the different institutions in our Western society, we find some that are encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater than the ones next in line. Their encompassing or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors. These establishments I am calling total institutions, and it is their general characteristics I want to explore.

“The total institutions of our society can be listed in five rough groupings. First, there are institutions established to care for persons felt to be both incapable and harmless; these are the homes for the blind, the aged, the orphaned, and the indigent. Second, there are places established to care for persons felt to be both incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one: TB [tuberculosis] sanitaria, mental hospitals, and leprosaria. A third type of total institution is organized to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the persons thus sequestered not the immediate issue: jails, penitentiaries, P.O.W. [prisoner of war] camps, and concentration camps. Fourth, there are institutions purportedly established the better to pursue some worklike task and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: army barracks, ships, boarding schools, work camps, colonial compounds, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants’ quarters. Finally, there are those establishments designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are abbeys, monasteries, convents, and other cloisters.”

[Erving Goffman. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books imprint of Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1961. Pages 4-5.]

“Although powerful institutional forces lend their massive weight to the tradition of keeping psychiatric problems within the conceptual framework of medicine, the moral and scientific challenge is clear: we must recast and redefine the problem of ‘mental illness’ so that it may be encompassed in a morally explicit science of man. This, of course, would require a radical revision of our ideas about ‘psychopathology’ and ‘psychotherapy’—the former having to be conceived in terms of sign-using, rule-following, and game-playing, the latter in terms of human relationships and social arrangements promoting certain types of learning and values.

“Human behavior is fundamentally moral behavior. Attempts to describe and alter such behavior without, at the same time, coming to grips with the issue of ethical values are therefore doomed to failure. Hence, so long as the moral dimensions of psychiatric theories and therapies remain hidden and inexplicit, their scientific worth will be seriously limited. In the theory of personal conduct which I have proposed— and in the theory of psychotherapy implicit in it—I have tried to correct this defect by articulating the moral dimensions of human behaviors occurring in psychiatric contexts.”

[Thomas S. Szasz. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 2010. Pages 262-263.]

“As a result of the anti-psychiatrists’ self-seeking sloganeering, psychiatrists can now do what no other members of a medical specialty can do: they can dismiss critics of any aspect of accepted psychiatric practice by labeling them ‘ anti-psychiatrists.’ The obstetrician who eschews abortion on demand is not stigmatized as an ‘ anti-obstetrician.’ The surgeon who eschews transsexual operations is not dismissed as an ‘ anti-surgeon.’ But the psychiatrist who eschews coercion and excusemaking is called an ‘ anti-psychiatrist.’ The upshot is that every physician—except the psychiatrist—is free to elect not to perform particular procedures that offend his moral principles or procedures he simply prefers not to perform.” [Thomas Szasz, “Anti-Coercion Is Not Anti-Psychiatry.” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. May, 2008. Pages 26-27.]

“Fifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases. It makes no sense to do so today. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by political-judicial decrees and economic criteria: old diseases such as homosexuality disappear, whereas new diseases such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder appear.…

“The proposition that mental illness is not a medical problem runs counter to public opinion and psychiatric dogma. When a person hears me say that there is no such thing as mental illness, he is likely to reply: ‘But I know so-and-so who was diagnosed as mentally ill and turned out to have a brain tumour. In due time, with refinements in medical technology, psychiatrists will be able to show that all mental illnesses are bodily diseases’. This contingency does not falsify my contention that mental illness is a metaphor. It verifies it. The physician who concludes that a person diagnosed with a mental illness suffers from a brain disease discovers that the person was misdiagnosed: he did not have a mental illness, he had an undiagnosed bodily illness. The physician’s erroneous diagnosis is not proof that the term mental illness refers to a class of brain diseases.”

[Thomas S. Szasz, “The myth of mental illness: 50 years later.” The Psychiatrist. Volume 35, 2011. Pages 179-182.]

“… [There is] confusion about antipsychiatry rampant in the literature …. They [my critics] could have easily remedied this by adding something like, ‘[Thomas S.] Szasz has made it clear that he is anti-coercion, not anti-psychiatry. In fact, for almost 50 years he has practiced what he calls “contractual psychiatry” or ‒listening and talking.”’” [Thomas S. Szasz, “Psychiatry, Anti-Psychiatry, Critical Psychiatry: What Do These Terms Mean?” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology: PPP. Volume 17, number 3, September 2010. Pages 229-232.]

“Language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in which madness articulates its nature. That the essence of madness can be ultimately defined in the simple structure of a discourse does not reduce it to a purely psychological nature, but gives it a hold over the totality of soul and body; such discourse is both the silent language by which the mind speaks to itself in the truth proper to it, and the visible articulation in the movements of the body. Parallelisms, complements, all the forms of immediate communication which we have seen manifested, in madness are suspended between soul and body in this single language and in its powers. The movement of passion which persists until it breaks and turns against itself, the sudden appearance of the image, and the agitations of the body which were its visible concomitants—all this, even as we were trying to reconstruct it, was already secretly animated by this language. If the determinism of passion is transcended and released in the hallucination of the image, if the image, in return, has swept away the whole world of beliefs and desires, it is because the delirious language was already present—a discourse which liberated passion from all its limits, and adhered with all the constraining weight of its affirmation to the image which was liberating itself.” [Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Richard Howard, translator. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 1988. Page 100.]

“But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as ‘asocial,’ The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.” [Michel Foucault. History of Madness. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, translators. Jean Khalfa, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 79-80.]

“Expert psychiatric opinion makes it possible to transfer the point of application of punishment from the offense defined by the law to criminality evaluated from a psychologico-moral point of view. Through this attribution of a causal relationship, whose tautological character is at the same time both obvious and of little importance (unless one attempts to analyze the rational structures of such a text, which would be interesting), we have gone from what could be called the target of punishment, the point of application of a mechanism of power, that is to say, of legal punishment, to a realm of objects of a knowledge, a technique of transformation, a whole set of rational and concerted coercions. It is true that expert psychiatric opinion contributes nothing to knowledge, but this is not what matters. Its essential role is to legitimize, in the form of scientific knowledge, the extension of punitive power to something that is not a breach of the law. What is essential is that it makes it possible to resituate the punitive action of judicial power within a general corpus of reflected techniques for the transformation of individuals.” [Michel Foucault. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. Graham Burchell, translator. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, editors. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2003. Page 18.]

“We come here to the point at which I would like to go back to our question, that is to say, to the problem of asylum discipline as constitutive of the general form of psychiatric power. I have tried to show [that—and to show] how—what appeared openly, as it were, in the naked state, in psychiatric practice at the start of the nineteenth century, was a power with the general form of what I have called discipline.…

“… [Jeremy] Bentham does not even say that it [the Panopticon] is a schema for institutions, he says that it is a mechanism, a schema which gives strength to any institution, a sort of mechanism by which the power which functions, or which should function in an institution will be able to gain maximum force. The Panopticon is a multiplier; it is an intensifier of power within a series of institutions. It involves giving the greatest intensity, the best distribution, and the most accurate focus to the force of power.”

[Michel Foucault. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974. Graham Burchell, translator. Jacques Lagrange, editor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2006. Pages 73-74.]

“The underlying criticisms of ‘anti-psychiatry’ (in a broad, not the UK-specific, sense) are amplified in a series of rather generic characterizations of a whole series of developments ….” [Andrew Goffey, “Guattari and transversality: Institutions, analysis and experimentation.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 195, January/February 2016. Pages 38-47.]

“Erving Goffman, the most influential sociological theorist in the ‘anti-psychiatry’ tradition, offers in different works a number of quite distinct approaches in the demarcation of physical from psychiatric disorders. One of his most readable books, Stigma, applies a careful phenomenological and interpersonal analysis to the victims of physical handicap and disfigurement, with a method very similar to that adopted in his celebrated study of ‘The Moral Career of the Mental Patient.’

“Thus far, Goffman would appear to be using a unitary schema in which the division of the patients’ ‘physical’ categories would contribute nothing to our further understanding of the difficulties experienced by the subject in his various social settings and encounters. Elsewhere, a more definite distinction between physical and psychiatric symptom construction is propounded.”

[Peter Sedgwick, “Mental Illness Is Illness.” Salmagundi. Number 20, summer–fall 1972. Pages 196-224.]

“In a previous essay [‘Mental Illness Is Illness’] I have identified and attacked a curious distinction which has become a postulate of much theoretical in ‘anti-psychiatry.’ A number of authors who are critical of psychiatric theory or practice tend to rest their case on a sharp ferentiation which they say can be made between the character diagnosis in physical illnesses and the nature of diagnostic classification in mental illness.… My conclusion was, baldly put, that all ascriptions of illness, whether ‘physical’ or ‘mental,’ are heavily loaded with social value-judgments. For illness is ascribed to another, or else avowed by the ill person, when some gap opens up between (a) a presented behaviour feeling and (b) an important social norm. Illness is deviancy, not all deviancy is illness. To be ill is to manifest discomfort failure in a particular context: it is not simply to fail or to be uncomfortable.” [Peter Sedgwick, “Goffman’s Anti-Psychiatry.” Salmagundi. Number 26, spring 1974. Pages 26-51.]

“Recently psychiatrists reported an increase in anxiety neuroses in children as a result of the earth tremors in Southern California. For these children the discovery that life really includes cataclysmic danger was too much for their still-imperfect denial systems—hence open outbursts of anxiety. With adults we see this manifestation of anxiety in the face of impending catastrophe where it takes the form of panic. Recently several people suffered broken limbs and other injuries after forcing open their airplane’s safety door during take-off and jumping from the wing to the ground; the incident was triggered by the backfire of an engine. Obviously underneath these harmless noises other things are rumbling in the creature.

“But even more important is how repression works: it is not simply a negative force opposing life energies; it lives on life energies and uses them creatively. I mean that fears are naturally absorbed by expansive organismic striving. Nature seems to have built into organisms an innate healthy-mindedness; it expresses itself in self-delight, in the pleasure of unfolding one’s capacities into the world, in the incorporation of things in that world, and in feeding on its limitless experiences. This is a lot of very positive experience, and when a powerful organism moves with it, it gives contentment. As [George] Santayana once put it: a lion must feel more secure that God is on his side than a gazelle. On the most elemental level the organism works actively against its own fragility by seeking to expand and perpetuate itself in living experience; instead of shrinking, it moves toward more life. Also, it does one thing at a time, avoiding needless distractions from all-absorbing activity; in this way, it would seem, fear of death can be carefully ignored or actually absorbed in the life-expanding processes.”

[Ernest Becker. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press imprint of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1975. Page 21.]

“As we might expect, the grossest differences from our modern Western definition of ‘normal’ behavior would be found among those societies that lived in a dual universe. They would tend to value experiences in the invisible world, and a talent for such experiences. And so we find that auditory hallucinations can be normal in a culture where one is expected to hear periodically the voice of God; visual hallucinations can be normal where, as among the Plains Indians, one’s Guardian Spirit manifested itself in a vision; or where, as among South Italian Catholics, the appearance of the Virgin Mary is a blessed event. Spirit possession can be a great talent even though we consider it psychiatrically a form of dissociation. What we call ‘hysterical symptoms’ are thought to be signs of special gifts, powers that come to lodge in one’s body and show themselves by speaking strange tongues through the mouth of the one who is possessed, and so on. Primitive societies may give their highest rewards to such people, as they do to the shaman whose social function it is to travel into the invisible world and cope with the spirits there. No matter that the shaman may be labelled ‘psychotic’ by our standard psychiatric textbooks, his private experiences of trances, delusions, hallucinations can find a perfect place in tribal life, since all mysterious cause-and-effect, all vital power, lies in the dimension of the invisible.” [Ernest Becker. The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man. Second edition. New York: The Free Press imprint of the Macmillan Company. 1971. Page 131.]

“The purpose of this article is to suggest an approach to diagnosis involving what will be called normalization in order to avoid harming rather than helping the prospective patient. This is not to say that one should always normalize. Automatic responses, whether labeling or normalizing, are equally undesirable. Labeling/normalization theory suggests that we need to decrease automatic responses of both kinds. Automatic normalizing can result in enabling, and automatic labeling can result in social rejection.

“This article has suggested an idea that might help us individually be better therapists or teachers and in the long run change our medical, psychotherapeutic, and educational institutions. The theory of labeling/normalizing alerts us to the dangers of automatic reactions of labeling as well as enabling and gives examples of how both extremes might be avoided. These ideas might help both individuals and societies grow and prosper.”

[Thomas Scheff, “Normalizing Symptoms: Neither Labeling nor Enabling.” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. Volume 12, number 3, 2010. Pages 232-237.]

“As a therapist, from the first moment of contact try to form an empathic emotional union with the depressed patient, by hook or crook, no matter the content. Some find this goal fairly easy, but others might need coaching and practice. Get off of TOPICS, into RELATIONSHIP talk. Discussion of anything that is not happening in the moment is topic talk. An example of relationship talk is ‘I didn’t understand what you just said. Could you repeat it?’ or ‘You seem sad,’ ‘I am proud of you,’ ‘You seem distracted,’ and so on. Relationship talk is about what is happening in the moment, either to the patient or therapist, or between them. For most people, it is very difficult to stay on track, avoid topic talk.” [Thomas Scheff, “A Social Theory and Treatment of Depression.” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. Volume 11, number 1, 2009. Pages 37-49.]

“Hidden, covert shame, in combination with either hidden or overt rage, may be the primary components of hatred. The first step is to discuss intense rage. An immediate problem in making this argument persuasive is the difficulty of describing in words the experience of rage and other compelling emotions. When readers are sitting in the comfort of their study, feeling more or less safe and secure, it will take some effort to help them visualize the intensity of ‘war fever,’ or of the feelings that lead to massacres on a vast scale. The intensity and primitiveness of fury beggars verbal description. How is one to convey intense feelings with mere words? Here I will resort to archaic literature, where this difficulty was dealt with by florid exaggeration, so that the words could point the reader toward the intensity of the actual feelings. These words, I take it, are not meant to describe outer reality (they are far too gross), but instead to convey inner, experiential reality, the objective correlative as T.S. Eliot called it, of a fit of rage.” [Thomas J. Scheff, “Is Hatred Formed by Hidden Shame and Rage?” Humanity and Society. Volume 28, number 1, February 2004. Pages 24-39.]

“I do not myself believe that there is any such ‘condition’ as ‘schizophrenia.’ Yet the label is a social fact. Indeed this label as social fact, is a political event. This political event, occurring in the civic order of society, imposes definitions and consequences on the labelled person. It is a social prescription that rationalizes a set of social actions whereby the labelled person is annexed by others, who are legally sanctioned, medically empowered, and morally obliged, to become responsible for the person labelled. The person labelled is inaugurated not only into a role, but into a career of patient, by the concerted actions of numerous others who for some considerable time become the only ones with whom a sustained relationship is permitted. The ‘committed’ person labelled as patient, and specifically as ‘schizophrenic,’ is degraded from full existential status as human agent and responsible person, no longer in possession of his own definition of himself, unable to retain his own possessions, precluded from the exercise of his discretion as to whom he meets, what he does. His time is no longer his own and the space he occupies is no longer of his choosing.” [R. D. Laing, “What is schizophrenia?” New Left Review. Series I, number 28, November–December 1964. Pages 63-68.]

“Instead of dementia praecox, read process schizophrenia. Instead of ‘hydrotherapeutic institution,’ read one of our best hospitals or sanatoria. Instead of ‘gymnastic exercises, etc.,’ read group therapy, occupational therapy, milieu therapy. Add a touch of psychotherapy, a sprinkling of electro-shocks for the depression, a dab of hormones for the arrest in his development, and some vitamins and drugs, so as not to deprive him of the benefit of any chance that recent advances in psychiatry can offer.” [R. D. Laing. The Politics of the Family. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press Limited. 1993. Page 22.]

“A certain amount of the incomprehensibility of a schizophrenic’s speech and action becomes intelligible if we remember that there is the basic split in his being carried over from the schizoid state. The individual’s being is cleft in two, producing a disembodied self and a body that is a thing that the self looks at, regarding it at times as though it were just another thing in the world. The total body and also many ‘mental’ processes are severed from the self, which may continue to operate in a very restricted enclave (phantasying and observing), or it may appear to cease to function altogether (i.e. be dead, murdered, stolen). This account is, of course, highly schematic and has the failings of any preliminary over-simplification.” [R. D. Laing. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New York: Penguin Books. 1990. Page 162.]

“The problem of the diagnosis, which of course enters into every report on schizophrenia, is extremely difficult, there being no generally agreed criteria or standards of reliability, regional, national, or international.…

“For socio-economic reasons, for a long time to come, patients will have to go back to their families, who will have to put up with one another. We try to help the patient and his family to be less disturbing to each other by intensive work with the whole family, including the patient during his stay in hospital. By the time the patient is discharged they will perhaps have learned to understand one another a little better and have come to feel there is someone else who understands them.…

“Twenty male and 22 female schizophrenics were treated by conjoint family and milieu therapy in two mental hospitals with reduced use of tranquillizers. No individual psychotherapy was given. None of the so-called shock treatments was used, nor was leucotomy. All patients were discharged within one year of admission. The average length of stay was three months. Seventeen per cent. were readmitted within a year of discharge. Seventy per cent. of the others were sufficiently well adjusted socially to be able to earn their living for the whole of the year after discharge.”

[A. Esterson, D. G. Cooper, and R. D. Laing, “Results of Family-orientated Therapy with Hospitalized Schizophrenics.” The British Medical Journal. Volume 2, issue 5476, December 1965. Pages 1462-1465.]

“Persons are not separate objects in space. They are centres of orientation to the world. These different centres and their worlds are not islands, but the nature of their reciprocal influence and interaction has always been difficult to incorporate adequately into interpersonal theory. By considering the person from the beginning always in terms of one of his group metamorphoses, without according any theoretical or methodological priority to the person as an abstracted ego extrapolated from his interhuman context, there is some hope that a radical advance in our thinking in this respect is possible.” [R. D. Laing, “Series and Nexus in the Family.” New Left Review. Series I, number 15, May–June 1962. Pages 7-14.]

“Because capitalism’s atomizing powers systematically and permanently cripple a class of people into vassals - externally and internally - it’s understandable that the totality of people of whom Engels speaks, who had been stricken by illness, can be understood as the unity of harms that come with wage-dependency and as the revolt of Life against these harms which reduce people to the status of objects.

“Since 1845 the relationship has fundamentally changed, but the alienation remains, and it will last as long as the capitalist system. It is, as you say, ‘assumption and result’ of the relations of production. Illness – you point out – is the only possible form of life in capitalism. In fact, the psychiatrist, who is wage dependent, is a sick person like each of us. The ruling classes merely give him the power to ‘cure’ or to hospitalize. Cure – this is self-evident – can’t be understood in our system to mean the elimination of illness: it serves exclusively as the maintenance of the ability to go to work where one stays sick. In our society there are the well and the cured (two categories of unwittingly sick people who fit the norms of production), and on the other hand those recognized as sick, who are rendered incapable of performing wage work, and whom one sends to the psychiatrist. This ‘policeman’ begins by placing them outside the purview of the law by denying them the most fundamental rights. He is clearly an accomplice of the atomizing powers: he approaches individual cases as if psycho-neurotic disturbances were the personal flaw and fate of an individual.”

[Jean-Paul Sartre, “Foreword,” in Socialist Patients’ Collective of the University of Heidelberg Turn Illness Into a Weapon: A Polemic and Call to Action by the Socialist Patients’ Collective of the University of Heidelberg. K. D., translator. 2013. Pages vii-x. (Unauthorized, privately published translation of SPK: Aus Krankheit Eine Waffe Machen. Munich, West Germany: TriKont-Verlag. 1972.]

“A … distinguishing feature of the anti-psychiatric critique is its rootedness in a wider critique of society, which, it was argued, is oppressive and requires the distortion and repression of human potentialities for its effective functioning. This wider societal focus linked the anti-psychiatrists, conceptually, to other political movements of their time and these conceptual links were often consolidated through more practical cooperation.…

“This degree and form of criticism of psychiatry is, I suggest, historically unique and is thus partly definitive of anti-psychiatry. Or rather, it is if we add that anti-psychiatry posited its critique at a time when psychiatry itself was relatively well established; when there was a psychiatry to be ‘anti-’ towards.”

[Nick Crossley, “R. D. Laing and the British Anti-Psychiatry Movement: A Socio-Historical Analysis.” Social Science & Medicine. Volume 47, issue 7, October 1998. Pages 877-889.]

“… both [Thomas S.] Szasz and [R. D.] Laing recognized the inappropriateness of the medical metaphor as applied to human behavior. Szasz … famously described the very idea of mental illness as a myth. Insofar as both men refused to accept the metaphor of mental illness as biological reality and described some of the social processes and consequences of medicalization, their approaches can be said to be deconstructionist in flavor. The difficulties that brought people to seek help from mental health professionals were to be better described as ‘problems of living’—a phrase originally coined by Szasz …, though one with which Laing would have wholeheartedly concurred.” [Ron Roberts, “Laing and Szasz: Anti-psychiatry, Capitalism, and Therapy.” Psychoanalytic Review. Volume 93, number 5, October 2006. Pages 781-799.]

“The aim of this article is … to see how the language of psychiatry, and the representation it gave of the language of schizophrenia, has changed in accordance to the new approach to mental illness entailed by what we can loosely refer to as the anti-psychiatric school of thought.…

“What my work attempts to do … is … to highlight the relationship … fictional material might have with the real experience of schizophrenia and try to understand whether the advent of a different kind of psychiatric practice (which while not perhaps coinciding with, was certainly influenced by, the anti-psychiatric movement) created a different approach not only of the actual practice itself but also of its fictional representations.”

[Michela Canepari, “From Psychiatry to Anti-Psychiatry: an Intersemiotic Journey through the Language of Schizophrenia.” Torre di Babele: Rivista di Letteratura e Linguistica. Volume 8, 2012. Pages 297-337.]

“The institution of psychiatry grew up in the nineteenth century during the emergence and consolidation of industrial capitalism. Its function was to deal with abnormal and bizarre behaviour which, without breaking the law, did not comply with the demands of the new social and economic order. Its association with medicine concealed this political function of social control, by endowing it with the objectivity and neutrality of science. The medical model of mental disorder has served ever since to obscure the social processes that produce and define deviance by locating problems in individual biology.…

“Despite the political and professional retrenchment of recent years, there are many developments which presage the ultimate transformation of the psychiatric system. The burgeoning patients’ rights movement and the anti-psychiatry critique are some of these. Rejection of paternalism is also embodied in the increasingly important role of consumers in medicine in general, and the demand for justification of treatments and involvement in decision making.”

[Joanna Moncrieff, “The medicalisation of modern living.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Issue 6, summer 1997. Pages 63-72.]

“While there can be little doubt that the surrealists were antagonistic to psychiatry I would like to argue that a great deal of their work is of potential interest to psychiatrists. The surrealist movement was opposed to any form of rationalism. It was opposed to anything which could possibly limit the imagination and this was the source of its conflict with psychiatry. But surrealist art and literature was essentially an exploration of the bizarre, the irrational and the unconscious and these are subjects which are, of necessity, of importance to the psychiatrist and the psychotherapist.” [Patrick Bracken, “Psychiatry and Surrealism.” Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Volume 10, April 1986. Pages 80-81.]

“Chemical imbalance theories of mental disorder soon followed …, providing the scientific basis for psychiatric medications as possessing magic bullet qualities by targeting the presumed pathophysiology of mental disorder. Despite these promising developments, psychiatry found itself under attack from both internal and external forces. The field remained divided between biological psychiatrists and Freudians who rejected the biomedical model. Critics such as R. D. Laing … and Thomas Szasz … incited an ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement that publicly threatened the profession’s credibility.” [Brett J. Deacon, “The biomedical model of mental disorder: A critical analysis of its validity, utility, and effects on psychotherapy research.” Clinical Psychology Review. Volume 33, 2013. Pages 846-861.]

“While [R. D.] Laing never liked the term ‘anti-psychiatry’ – he was part of a wave, albeit not a uniformly characteristic one, of radical critiques of psychiatry.” [Adrian Chapman, “Into the Zone of the Interior: A Novel View of Anti-Psychiatry.” PsyArt Journal. Volume 18, 2014. Pages 14-24.]

“As a social movement and a theory, anti-psychiatry was founded in the 1960s. The term itself was introduced by the South African psychiatrist David Cooper, who, along with British psychiatrist Ronald Laing and American philosopher of psychiatry Thomas Szasz, played the greatest role in articulating the theory of this movement.” [Milanko Govedarica, “Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy of Psychiatry.” Theoria. Volume 2, 2012. Pages 13-20.]

“Anti-psychiatry compels psychiatry to be contemporary, to respond to its current challenges, not fall asleep into academicism and the tired repetition of authority. So while academic and institutional psychiatry, like any established profession, will tend towards conservatism, anti-psychiatry will always rouse it from its slumber to confront new problems and to update itself. For this reason, psychiatry can never rest. We will always need resistance to authority, challenges to established practice, and calls for change.” [Vincenzo Di Nicola, “Psychiatry Against Itself: Radicals, Rebels, Reformers & Revolutionaries A Philosophical Archaeology.” The Journal of The International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology. Volume 4, issue 1, December 2015. Pages 1-18.]

“The anti-psychiatric movement grew in the realm of politics, particularly the politics of the left, which was considered at one time the main source of progressive ideas and possibly the only instrument against capitalist oppres sion. It gained its initial respect and glamour from its association with the prevailing exist ential philosophy at that time. The need to stengthen the relationship between psychiatry and philosophy is an old one and is based on [Immanuel] Kant’s contention that judgements on matters of sanity should be the prerogative of the philosophical mind.” [Mervat Nasser, “The rise and fall of anti-psychiatry.” Psychiatric Bulletin. Volume 19, 1995. Pages 743-746.]

“The antipsychiatry movement arose as a group of scholarly psychoanalysts and sociologists shaped an organized opposition to what were perceived as biological psychiatry’s abuses in the name of science. This protest was joined by a 1960s worldwide counterculture that was already rebelling against all forms of political, sexual, and racial injustice.

“The term ‘antipsychiatry’ was first coined in 1967 by the South African psychoanalyst David Cooper well after the movement was already under way.”

[David J. Rissmiller and Joshua H. Rissmiller, “Evolution of the Antipsychiatry Movement Into Mental Health Consumerism.” Psychiatric Services. Volume 57, number 6, June 2006. Pages 863-866.]

“… the importance of Ronald [R. D.] Laing, one of the originators of English anti-psychiatry, lies in this ‘countercultural movement which combines politics with the problematic of the university,’ as Daniele Sabourin has said. Laing is firstly a deviant psychiatrist. For us, he was in the first place this frenzied and somewhat euphoric character, whose flare up with David Cooper had the effect of a bomb in the days of the study group Enfance Aliénée, organized in Paris in 1957 by Maud Mannoni and the journal Recherches.

“All of psychiatry speaks of the anti-psychiatry of Laing. But does Laing himself still speak of psychiatrists? He is far, already very far from their world and their preoccupations. He has undertaken this ‘trip,’ which he recommends to schizophrenics, on his own account, and he has abandoned his activities in London in order to meditate, so some say, in a monastery in Ceylon. On the other hand, his books are surely there too. It’s impossible to avoid them. They irritate and disrupt specialized gatherings. Public opinion gets mixed up with them.”

[Pierre-Félix Guattari, “The Divided Laing.” Gary Genosko, translator. The Guattari Reader. Gary Genosko, editor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1996. Pages 37-41.]

“The central feature of the orthodox Freudian system of thought was the one-to-one correlation between the elements of the individual unconscious and the components of the racial unconscious. The latter furnished the source of power and incvitability for the former. A corrolary of this feature was the doctrine of recapitulation by each person of the racial story, ogether the two levels of theory formed a logically coherent, beautifully synchronized interrelation between individual and racial ‘mind.’

“Built into the system was an impregnable defense. Any resistance to its acceptance was inescapably characterized as resistance to the primitive man in the critic’s own unconscious. It was an impressive and overpowering theoretical achievement. Its symmetry and compelling force was almost a thing of beauty.

“The orthodox Freudian system of thought was wholly free of internal contradiction. It was a monument to the creative consistency of its author. The internal logic, power, and symmetry of the theory, however, was achieved through disregard of large portions of established human knowledge. It was purchased at the expense of contradiction of such sciences as biology, physiology, medicine, anthropology, sociology, history, and experimental psychology. The most obvious and blatant contravention of science was the doctrine of the racial unconscious with its myth of the primal horde. Under the concerted attack of scientists, especially anthropologists, the American psychoanalytical theorists were forced to beat a hasty retreat. They abandoned that entire half of Freudian thought which furnished the sources for the individual unconscious drives, memories, phases, and taboos.

“This initial capitulation gave rise to an internal contradiction within the system itself. On the one hand innate drives, memories, phases, and taboos were still said to be the central features of the id, while on the other, their sources were denied. To overcome the conflict with science, the racial unconscious, the first line of defense, was sacrificed. But the analytical theoreticians in full retreat regrouped their forces behind their second line of defense. The inborn, unconscious mental structures were to be defended at any cost, for without them there would be no Freudianism. The Oedipus complex, the infantile sexual phases, and the like were said to belong to the individual id alone, albeit as innate features. This internal contradiction in psychoanalytic theory is the essential feature in revised Freudianism which led psychoanalysis eventually into the more advanced phase of reform. The reformists, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and the early Erich Fromm, succeeded in making psychoanalysis once more self-consistent as a theory—but at the sacrifice of what orthodox and revisionist analysts considered to be the heart of Freudianism, the innate memories, structures, and predeterminations.

“The transition from orthodox to revised psychoanalysis was produced by the external contradiction with science and resulted in a weakened structure built of only one type of theoretical blocks. The process of extracting the racial unconscious components left stresses, strains, and cracks which threatened eventually to topple the edifice. Toward the end of his life Freud, while applauding the popularity of his system in the United States, complained bitterly that it had been seriously ‘watered down.’”

[Harry K. Wells. The Failure of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Fromm. New York: International Publishers. 1963. Pages 34-35.]

“Dr. Harry K. Wells, an author and psychologist, died yesterday in Memorial Hospital. He was 64 years old and lived at 310 West 86th Street [New York, New York].

“Dr. Wells was formerly associate professor of psychology and philosophy at Hartwick and Bloomfield College and earlier was a lecturer on philosophy at Columbia University.

“In the 1930’s he established the San Cristobal Valley Ranch School, near Taos, N.M. [New Mexico]”

[Editor, “Harry K. Wells, 64, Psychologist, Dies.” The New York Times. February 9th, 1976. Page 30.]

“In 1965, a community of about twenty people gather around R. D. Laing. They settle in the suburbs of London, at Kingsley Hall, an old building which for a long time was a stronghold of the British labor movement. For the next five years, the leaders of antipsychiatry and patients who, according to them, ‘make a career of schizophrenia,’ will explore collectively the world of madness. Not the madness of asylums, but the madness each of us carries within, a madness they intend to liberate in order to lift inhibitions and symptoms of every kind. At Kingsley Hall, they overlook, or rather, try hard to overlook, the, distribution of roles among patients, psychiatrist, nurse, etc. No one is entitled to give or receive orders, to issue prescriptions …. Kingsley Hall is then a liberated piece of land, a base for the counter-culture movement.

“The antipsychiatrists want to go beyond the experiments in community psychiatry; according to them, these experiments still represent only reformist enterprises, which fail to really question the repressive institutions and traditional framework of psychiatry. Maxwell Jones and David Cooper, two of the main instigators of these attempts, will actively participate in the Ufe of Kingsley Hall. An tipsychiatry, then, can make use of its own recording surface, a kind of body without organs, with each corner of the house-the cellar, the terrace, the kitchen, the chapel …– each part of the collective life functioning like the gears of a big collective machine, taking each individual away from his immediate self and from his petty problems, so that he either devotes himself to the service of others, or falls upon himself in the sometimes dizzying process of regression.”

[Félix Guattari, “Mary Barnes’ ‘Trip.’” Ruth Ohayon, translator. Semiotext(e): The Journal of a Group Analyzing the Power Mechanisms which Produce and Maintain the Present Divisions of Knowledge. Volume II, number 3, 1977. Pages 63-72.]

“Since our Paleolithic ancestors most likely lived in ways similar to the residual ‘primitives,’ they too must have been free of these afflictions. Mental illness was not an innate human condition. Of course, there are organic causes for mental disturbance, such as brain damage or chemical imbalances, but these account for only a minority of cases. In the main, mental illness had to have social causes. It was how society was arranged that lay at the root of the problem.…

“In the late 1970’s – early 80’s, I read the anti-civilization writings of the ‘primitivist’ thinkers like John Zerzan and Fredy Perlman. They believe civilization a disastrous mistake and the only solution is returning to the hunting and gathering existence of our ancestors. ‘Technology’ was the problem and we had better get rid of it right away. Some choice! Either live in a cave or be tormented by lunatics! The ‘primitivists’ solution – return to the Paleolithic – required the death of 99% of the population – a ghastly ‘final solution’ to the problem of mental illness! On the other hand, the ‘civilized’ lunatics could turn the world into a cinder. One could easily become a pessimist. I chose not to.”

[Larry Gambone. The Primal Wound: An Exploration of the Possible Origin of Authoritarianism and Mental Illness. Nanaimo, British Columbia: Red Lion Press. 2005. Pages 1-2.]

“Capitalizing ‘Mad’ is analogous to capitalizing ‘Deaf’ (and analogous to capitalizing ‘Disability’).…

“If we wish to pursue the development of Mad studies—and I recognize that this is an open question issuing forth into complex strategic and tactical considerations—then Mad studies would, I hope, reflect the set of values around which the Mad community comes together, just as is the case for Deaf studies. We can observe a similar kind of trend within disability studies through the development of Disability culture, which heralds the transition from disability studies to Disability studies.…

“Regardless of whether or not my term, Mad studies, catches on, I think that this power-knowledge formation will continue to emerge within and beyond the boundaries of disability/Disability studies. Politically speaking, I would not want to see d/Disability studies fracture into multiple disciplines. But I do think that d/Disability should permit and facilitate the emergence of multiple streams around different disabilities, chronic illnesses, and so forth. As this process unfolds, the need for a focus on the problematic of ‘translation’ will increase. Disability studies can maintain its coherence as a discipline if it allows these various fields to emerge while thinking through the questions of translation that will further enable the generalized concept of ‘Disability’ to function as an umbrella for what are in effect many distinct social movements.”

[Richard Ingram, “From the Mad movement to Mad studies.” Letter. March 19th, 2008. Pages 1-2. Retrieved on February 19th, 2017.]

“… Richard Ingram reminds us of the debt that Mad Studies owes to ‘disability studies perspectives based on a transformative revaluation of the category of “disability”’ …. For Ingram and others who highlight this key disciplinary connection, the challenge for practitioners of Mad Studies—as with disability studies, deaf studies, and their many analogs— is to pursue this project of ‘transformative revaluation’ by carving out spaces of relative autonomy while simultaneously taking up the many ‘communalities’ and points of intersection between parallel fields of inquiry and action. Such a pursuit must reflect the specificities of Mad experience and politics (and thus is not fully co-extensive with disability studies), just as it seeks to forge strategic coalitions with other peoples in struggle ….” [Robert Menzies, Brenda A. LeFrançois, and Geoffrey Reaume, “Introducing Mad Studies.” Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies. Brenda A. LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume, editors. Toronto, Ontario: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. 2013. Pages 1-22.]

“Mad Matters offers a comprehensive, user-led, inclusive, well-evidenced and focused critical examination of madness and Mad Studies. At heart, it is a critique of the professional-led idea of ‘recovery’ central to contemporary mental health policy. Recovery is based on an inherently medicalised model of ‘getting better.’ It has two worrying implications. First, governments measure ‘getting better’ in terms of moving people off welfare into paid work and, secondly, policymakers take recovery – ‘getting better’ – to mean no longer needing help or support. This does not sit well with people who learn to live with mental illness and who can do this with support. Contra recovery, Mad Matters advances a demedicalised – social – understanding of madness and distress.” [Amanda Howard, “Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies.” Review article. Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development. Volume 24, issues 1–2, 2014. Pages 122-123.]

“That [R. D.] Laing has been an incredibly valuable and important influence, none can reasonably deny. However, there is a prominent strain of absolutization of the importance of certain experiences, especially of a way-out kind, which militates against Laing’s social views being acceptable as a progressive force. The point, as always of course, is not to chuck the baby out with the bath-water. I hope to avoid this in what follows which is an attempt (1) to give a brief résumé of Laing’s familial theory of schizophrenia, (2) to connect this with the manner in which the family should be seen as a microcosm of society, and (3) to show that Laing’s romanticization of madness is essentially a reactionary stance. Specifically, in relation to the last part, whilst labelling and stigmatism play a large and mystifying part in the plight of a schizophrenic, I do not regard madness as being merely a label.” [Joe Warrington, “A Critique of R. D. Laing’s Social Philosophy (Part 1).” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 4, spring 1973. Pages 10-16.]

“Critical theory refers specifically to the approach to the study of society developed in the mid-20ᵗʰ century, associated with the Frankfurt school of philosophy (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and latterly Jürgen Habermas). It started as a reaction against totalitarianism in Europe, and the threat to individual autonomy. In recent years critical theory has addressed the social role of science, and especially the nature of theory in human sciences. This has resulted in the growth of critical psychology since the late 1980s, and more recently of critical psychiatry.” [Philip Thomas and Patrick Bracken, “Critical psychiatry in practice.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. Volume 10, 2005. Pages 361-370.]

“This paper articulates a perspective on critical social work that draws from poststructuralism and critical theory. Arguing that the critique of positivism, the unreliability of generalizations about humans, and the influence of new social movements have undermined the credibility of mainstream social work practice and theory, the author advocates the need for social work theory and practice that is predicated on social justice. The paper offers a critique of structuralist approaches to practice and then seeks to embed social work practice in epistemic responsibility and communicative responsibility.” [Amy B. Rossiter, “A Perspective on Critical Social Work.” Abstract. Journal of Progressive Human Services. Volume 7, Issue 2, 1997. Pages 23-41. Retrieved on August 30th, 2015.]

“Critical gerontology arose, at least in part, in opposition to the conventional ‘social problems’ approach to aging. By offering an alternative, whether through political economy or hermeneutics and ideology critique, critical gerontology gave voice to what [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel called ‘the tremendous power of the negative.’ This oppositional stance was a contribution of extraordinary importance. Critical gerontology also reaffirmed the importance of theory, especially what would come to be called ‘grand theory’ in the tradition of thinkers in the European branch of Critical Theory ([Theodor] Adorno, [Max] Horkheimer, [Herbert] Marcuse).” [Harry R. Moody, “Afterword: The maturing of critical gerontology.” Journal of Aging Studies. Volume 22, 2008. Pages 205-209.]

“The imposition and maintenance of global capitalism has meant that military oppression is a phenomenon widely felt in much of the world. I am certainly not suggesting thatmilitary campaigns are unique to capitalism but rather that the present empire-building projects, military and otherwise, are enabled by and organized according to capitalist principals and promote the U.S. model of capitalist liberal democracy as their highest moral goal and justification, regardless of what indigenous political and economic systems might be displaced and the violence thereby incurred by civilian populations. The historical precedents set in Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and Panama, among other nations, show a clear will to the use of deadly force by the United States and those in its sphere of influence. The present conflict in Iraq and the subtler but no less deadly expansionist campaigns in Chiapas and Colombia are demonstrations of a continuation of the U.S. empire-building project.” [Grant Kien, “Culture, State, Globalization: The Articulation of Global Capitalism.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 4, number 4, 2004. Pages 472-500.]

“… reflexivity must be at the heart of any attempt to approach the study of international politics, and certainly those adopting the preface ‘critical.’ With these issues firmly in mind, I want to suggest that defining critical terrorism studies in terms of a concern with emancipation may prove useful both in guiding the types of questions we might ask and particularly in providing ‘philosophical anchorage’ … for an emphasis on those voices marginalised or excluded from traditional accounts of ‘terrorism’ and responses to it.” [Matt McDonald, “Emancipation and Critical Terrorism Studies.” European Political Science. Volume 6, number 3, September 2007. Pages 252-259.]

“In this article, I have attempted briefly to sketch out the basis for an explicitly ‘critical’ terrorism studies in first, a multi-level critique of the field; and second, the articulation of a minimal set of shared epistemological, ontological and ethical–normative commitments. Clearly, this is only the starting point in a long and potentially fraught intellectual struggle and there are many dangers along the way, not least that CTS [critical terrorism studies] will fail to engage with orthodox terrorism studies scholars and security officials and instead evolve into an exclusionary and marginalised, ghettoised subfield.” [Richard Jackson, “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies.” European Political Science. Volume 6, number 3, September 2007. Pages 244-251.]

“With the knowledge of the social-religious history of militancy in Algeria and the region, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) render it impossible to conduct a sufficient study without incorporating inter-subjective practices; thus the history of AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, (Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, التَنْظِيم القَاعِدَة فِي البِلَاد المَغْرِب الإِسْلَامِيّ, ʾal-Tanẓīm ʾal-Qāʿidaẗ fī ʾal-bilād ʾal-Maġrib ʾal-ꞌIslāmiyy)], and the social construction of their actions and strategies should be focused on and taken into consideration when formulating an adequate response.” [Alta Grobbelaar and Hussein Solomon, “The origins, ideology and development of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” Africa Review. Volume 7, number 2, 2015. Pages 149-161.]

“Critical media studies insists on thick systemic industrial analyses; analytical critiques based on poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and textuality; culturally informed aesthetic readings of texts, objects, and semiotic systems; detailed and ethnographically informed audience studies; or on any number of the other ways that you and I have been trained to think, write, and teach about media and media culture. The particularized discourses of the Religious Right, the Methodists, the Shalalas, the liberals, and the grassroots come together before the barricades of the media literacy movement; to the extent they stake out their common ground with the same paradigms against which the critical media studies project defined itself in the 1960s and 1970s, then we stand at fundamental odds with the media literacy movement.” [Jim Wehmeyer, “Critical Media Studies and the North American Media Literacy Movement.” Cinema Journal. Volume 39, number 4, summer 2000. Pages 94-101.]

“This special issue is deliberately interdisciplinary. By extending play into critical media studies, we investigate how a variety of disciplines bring play beyond its function in game studies and consider how play provides a means to bridge diverse theoretical worlds. These conversations began at the MediaCon: Extending Play conference, held on April 2013 at Rutgers University. The intent of the conference was to de-balkanize play as a concept and theory. Here, we bring together voices from disparate fields in order to consider how play unearths new ways to consider the sociotechnical shifts to which we are subject.” [Aaron Trammel and Anne Gilbert, “Extending Play to Critical Media Studies.” Games and Culture. Volume 9, number 6, 2014. Pages 391-405.]

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.” [Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1994. Pages 7-8.]

“The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology— is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to ‘the others.’ And they’re changing dramatically.

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.”

[Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Corte Madera, California: Gingko Press. 1967. Page 9.]

“Print as an immediate technological extension of the human person gave its first age an unprecedented access of power and vehemence. Visually, print is very much more ‘high definition’ than manuscript Print was, that is to say, a very ‘hot.’ medium corning into a world that for thousands of years bad been served by the ‘cool.’ medium of script Thus our own ‘roaring twenties’ were the first to feel the hot movie medium and also the hot radio medium. It was the first great consumer age. So with print Europe experienced its first consumer phase, for not only is print a consumer medium and commodity, but it taught men how to organize all other activities on a systematic lineal basis. It showed men how to create markets and national armies. For the hot medium of print enabled men to see their vernaculars for the first time, and to visualize national unity and power in terms of the vernacular bounds: ‘We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake.’” Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenburg Galaxy. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press. 1962. Page 138.]

“All the backward countries in the global village are as much turned on by the electric environment as the American Negro or the teen-agers of the Western world. The elders of the literate societies don’t easily turn on because their sensibilities have hardened in a visual mold. But pre-literates and semi-literates and the non-literates of our own society not only ‘turn on’ but they also turn against the older literate and mechanical culture. The American Negro who has long coexisted with this literate culture especially feels anger when he gets ‘turned on,’ because he can see that the causes of his degradation are to be found in a technology that is now repudiated by his masters. When the electric age began to be felt during and after the First World War, the world of Negro jazz welled up to conquer the white. Jazz was Negro product because it is directly related to speech rhythms rather than to any printed page or score. Primitive, tactile art and kinetically charged rhythms in music and painting alike are the normal modes of any non-literate world. They have now become the central mode of our latest technology. This new electric technology, like any other innovation, affords a mirror in which we see the old technologies with ever increasing clarity.” [Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. War and Peace in the Global Village. San Francisco, California: HardWired. 1997. Pages 79-80.]

“… critical geopolitics seems to rest on general declarations about space and power. Despite the wealth of recent literature on critical geopolitics, there remains a pressing need to deepen and sharpen its character as a distinct intellectual and political project. Part of the reason why critical geopolitics has not yet distinguished itself in a sufficiently precise manner is its surprising failure to rigorously conceptualize and theorize the very object that supposedly defines it: geopolitics. As a concept, geopolitics is regularly evoked and knowingly used yet rarely problematized. There is not yet an adequate theoretical discussion of the functioning of geopolitics as a sign within critical geopolitics. Nor has there been an explicit theoretical discussion of how critical geopolitics should function and how it needs to engage what we have already identified as the geopolitical gaze.” [Gearóid Ó Tuathail. Critical Geopolitics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 48-49.]

“Concisely defined, critical geopolitics seeks to reveal the hidden politics of geopolitical knowledge. Rather than defining geopolitics as an unproblematic description of the world political map, it treats geopolitics as a discourse, as a culturally and politically varied way of describing, representing and writing about geography and international politics. Critical geopolitics does not assume that “geopolitical discourse” is the language of truth; rather, it understands it as a discourse seeking to establish and assert its own truths. Critical geopolitics, in other words, politicizes the creation of geopolitical knowledge by intellectuals, institutions and practicing statesmen.” [Gearóid Ó Tuathail, “Introduction: Thinking critically about geopolitics.” The Geopolitics Reader. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Pages 1-12.]

“Critical geopolitics has emerged out of the work of a number of scholars in the fields of geography and international relations who, over the last decade, have sought to investigate geopolitics as a social, cultural and political practice, rather than as a manifest and legible reality of world politics. Critical geopolitics is informed by postmodern critiques that have placed the epistemological limits of the ethnocentric practices underpinning Cold War geopolitics in question. Dissonant and dissident voices have articulated feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist perspectives on the power strategies of Cold War discourse itself, on its privileging and marginalizing, its inclusions and exclusions, on, in sum, the geo-politics of geopolitics itself.” [Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby, “Introduction: Rethinking Geopolitics—Towards a critical geopolitics.” Rethinking Geopolitics. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 1-15.]

“Critical Geopolitics was my introductory text to political geography, cartographies of geopolitical strategy, and all the ‘great men’ and grand narratives that put geography on the map …. The text shows how ‘geopolitical proximity’ to the US is far more important than mere spatial proximity.” [Jennifer Hyndman, “Critical Geopolitics: Deconstructing the old and reconstructing anew.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 39, number 5, 2015. Pages 666-667.]

“In this paper we argue that a new phase in the geographical study of disability is emergent. Although the flurry of scholarly activity that characterized the mid-1990s to early 2000s has eased, a number of authors are beginning to identify the potential for a novel approach to dis/ability, drawing on the relational turn and, in particular, non-representational theory (NRT), in geography …. We contend that these developments have the potential not only to advance our understanding of the complex and emergent geographies of disability, but also to unsettle broader assumptions about the nature of the ‘able-body.’” [Edward Hall and Robert Wilton, “Towards a relational geography of disability.” Progress in Human Geography. OnlineFirst edition. August, 2016. Pages 1-18.]

“This chapter presents disability as an issue of human freedom. It discusses the relation between ability and freedom. Many traditional approaches to freedom tend to rule out the idea that disability can be seen as an issue of human freedom. However, it is suggested here that such approaches render freedom quite meaningless in a lot of contexts when, in real life, the importance of freedom stems from the fact that we consider it to have practical meaning. A model of freedom is introduced that links freedom quite closely with ability, capturing the idea that freedom has practical meaning. Using that model, disability can be seen as an issue of freedom. Indeed, it is shown that the kinds of things denied to people who are disabled are important basic freedoms that are conditional to the enjoyment of many other aspects of life. An advantage of such an approach is that it gives disabled people’s claims for better social provision more moral force. That is, they are claims for the provision of important basic freedoms, which any notion of a just and fair society ought to take seriously. Such an approach, then, renders our concept of freedom more inclusive, meaningful and applicable, enabling theorists to more adequately articulate the remediable hardships endured by many members of our community.” [Richard Hull, “Disability and freedom.” Arguing about Disability: Philosophical perspectives. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 93-104.]

“Starting from the social foundations of institutions, our central aim is to show how institutional complementarity and institutional change can be explained through analysing shifting relationships of social forces. More precisely, we ask how an empirical investigation of relationships of forces can be operationalised. To this end, we propose a ‘historical materialist policy analysis’ (HMPA) approach, in which we have integrated insights of CC [comparative capitalisms] approaches, and which we will briefly illustrate later in the paper by analysing the constellation of forces in the current Euro crisis.…

“… The HMPA operationalises the analysis of social struggles and relationships of forces in three steps: context analysis, actor analysis and process analysis.”

[John Kannankulam and Fabian Georgi, “Varieties of capitalism or varieties of relationships of forces? Outlines of a historical materialist policy analysis.” Capital & Class. Volume 38, number 1, 2013. Pages 59-71.]

“This article develops a gendered state-theoretical materialist framework to show how capitalism as an economic system and the nation-state reproduce gendered hierarchies on multiple levels. With a focus on the symbolic masculine cultural order and its hegemonic political rationality of governing, the current economic crisis and its effects on gender regimes is discussed more specifically.…

“… I will describe from a gendered state-theoretical materialist perspective how modern capitalism and the nation-state are structured by gender relations and a specific political rationality of masculine hegemony. I then go on to explain how this relates to gender regimes in the European Union (EU) ….”

[Stefanie Wöhl, “The state and gender relations in international political economy: A state-theoretical approach to varieties of capitalism in crisis.” Capital & Class. Volume 38, number 1, 2014. Pages 87-99.]

“Let us call social-democratic transformations those transformations that, in the macroscopic framework of a market social economy, lead to processes of regulation and redistribution that can be ensured by the state, by institutional complexes akin to states, or by organisms arising from interstate coordination. For example, those which operate in the domains of financial control, employment contracts, basic income, fiscal policy, social policy, and incentives to help steer economic activity, productive or financial, in a reasonable direction, and so on.

“Let us call socialist transformations those that, at the microeconomic level, result in organizing alternative modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Here I am referring to the amorphous grouping formed by what is referred to as ‘mechanisms of social and economic solidarity,’ based on traditions of associationism or cooperativism, an economy not afraid to confront questions about transforming the regime of property and the conditions of economic decision-making.

“Let us call communist transformations those that can bring human interests to express themselves without fuelling the spiral of capital’s enlarged self-reproduction, a break that thus exerts an influence on life forms and on the economic universe. It can be said that some contemporary movements (those that go in the direction of decommodification, demonetarization, deglobalization, degrowth), however localized their field of application may be today, already symbolically express the political and ethical importance of these transformations.”

[Stéphane Haber, “Emancipation from Capitalism?” Steven Corcoran, translator. Critical Horizons. Volume 15, number 2, July 2014. Pages 194-205.]

“One consequence of these new forms of global integration is that political struggles by labouring classes take myriad forms. While large-scale ‘Manchester-like’ struggles may characterise China’s Pearl River Delta, other regions of the world system experience different forms of economic organisation and social struggle.…

“… the above-mentioned struggles present new developmental opportunities for the world’s labouring classes – within, against and potentially beyond capitalism. A task of a labour-centred development studies will be to try to comprehend the circumstances that give rise to such struggles, the forms they take, their capacity to ameliorate their participants’ livelihoods under capitalism, and their potential to transcend capitalism and establish a post-capitalist developmental process. The remainder of this article suggests that by looking back at how Marx considered the struggles of his day to be developmental, we can begin to establish the basis of a labour-centred development studies.”

[Benjamin Selwyn, “Karl Marx, Class Struggle and Labour-Centred Development.” Global Labour Journal. Volume 4, issue 1, January 2013. Pages 48-70.]

“This book grew out of an actual situation: the theoretical discussions and active political controversy taking place in West Germany at the present time, in which sexuality, political struggle and social liberation all play a part. Yet it deals almost exclusively with one aspect of the question: the change in the role of sexuality under the cultural dominance of late capitalism. The reason for this is not an academic desire to limit the field of study. The methods of ruling human beings under contemporary capitalism have borrowed in so sophisticated a manner from the sexual revolution that a naive belief in the self-liberating force of sexuality under such a system is no longer easy. There have in fact only been two movements within the radical camp in West Germany which have openly attempted to formulate the problems of sexuality and have combined the aim of social emancipation with a direct aim to revolutionize sexuality: the First Commune in West Berlin and the Independent High School Students’ Action Centre (Auss). But in practice, their attempts to revolutionize the sexual attitudes of society and the sexuality of their own members, or to incorporate the necessity of such a revolution into a programme of political enlightenment, have so far been a failure.” [Reimut Reiche. Sexuality and Class Struggle. Susan Bennett, translator. London: New Left Books. 1970. Pages 13-14.]

“I … argue that we must see financial globalization and US state power not as two analytical concepts, but as one. Having said that, this essay will contribute to this framework by showing US hegemony through the more ‘structural’ transnational-historical power it possesses. Transnational Historical Materialism (THM) seems indispensible in providing the normative and ideological dimensions for sustaining US’ empire.…

“First, the social relations of production are crucial to understand the subordination of labour to capital …, and how this process of commodification and socialization brings ever more lives into the capitalist process. Thus, the commodification and the deepening of capitalist relations of production show us a different way to look at power dimensions within and across nations. Second, the concept fractions of capital (money, commodity and productive capital) was deployed by [Karl] Marx to understand how economic fractions operated behind the political parties …. This was to understand how capital creates historically specific, albeit contingent, combinations that crystallize in class formations.…

“Third, this theory involves the role of the state. Instead of analysing the state through reductionist state-centric notions, the form a state takes in THM terms rests on the ‘statesociety complex’—a more integral approach to understand the state.…

“Fourth, it deals with how these ‘hegemonic blocs’ transcend to and become embedded in a wider context of social relations. In this respect it is crucial to understand the concept of the internationalization of the state. With this is meant that states became integrated into a larger political inter-state structure where there is a general consensus among these states to engage with the goals of a transnational dominant class fraction.”

[Paul Diepenbrock, “Consolidating US Hegemony: A neo-Gramscian Synthesis of Pantich and Gindin, and Konings.” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice. Number 21, 2014. Pages 29-41.]

“… we conducted a critical grounded theory study with 23 FOC [faculties of color] in predominately Euro-American schools of nursing.…

“Faculty of color (FOC) are critical to our ability to diversify the nursing profession, yet little is known about the experiences of this group in predominantly Euro-American schools of nursing. For the purposes of this article, the term Euro-American refers to individuals of solely European descent residing in the United States. To understand the experiences of FOC better, we conducted a grounded theory investigation. The aims of the study were to: 1) explore the influence of racism on nursing FOC; 2) identify strategies to support the recruitment and retention of nursing FOC; and 3) develop a substantive grounded theory of the experiences of faculty of color in predominantly Euro-American schools of nursing.”

[Dena Hassouneh, “Having influence: Faculty of color having influence in schools of nursing.” Nursing Outlook. Volume 61, issue 3, May–June 2013. Pages 153-163.]

“We studied the experiences of faculty of color at predominantly White medical schools using a grounded theory approach situated in the critical paradigm). Some of the basic assumptions of the critical paradigm include the belief that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are socially and historically constituted, that certain groups in any society are privileged over others, and that language is central to the formation of subjectivity. Thus, a critical grounded theory approach builds on and revises the classical grounded theory of Glaser and Strauss by acknowledging the constructed nature of knowledge and knowledge development, while also recognizing the importance of privileging the standpoint of oppressed groups in the research process.” [Dena Hassouneh, Kristin F. Lutz, Ann K. Beckett, Edward P. Junkins, Jr., and LaShawn L. Horton, “The experiences of underrepresented minority faculty in schools of medicine.” Medical Education Online. Creative Commons. Volume 19, 2004. Pages 1-14.]

“… I will provide some background to grounded theory; explain how I used it within my research as a PhD student and the challenges I faced; and offer some conclusions in which I argue for a critical grounded theory.…

“Grounded theory had its beginnings during the sixties in the work of Bernie Glaser and Anselm Strauss … and it is often reported to be one of the most popular methods of qualitative research in the social sciences …. Glaser and Strauss developed a method for working in an inductive way, from data to theory, rather than the other way around. ‘Ivory tower’ theorizing, which sought examples from the world beyond to verify its propositions, was fundamentally challenged by a ‘grounded’ approach which discovered theory ‘through interaction with the empirical world, not in isolation from it’ ….”

[James Nelson, “Navigating grounded theory: a critical and reflective response to the challenges of using grounded theory in an education PhD.” Critical and Reflective Practice in Education. Volume 4, article 3, 2015. Pages 18-24.]

“The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore Lakota leadership qualities in urban and reservation settings. Using a critical grounded theory approach …, this study attempted to extend current leadership theory by giving voice to non-mainstream individuals in exploring leadership from a Lakota perspective. The central question for the study was: What leadership characteristics are needed to be a successful leader?” [Kem M. Gambrell. Healers and Helpers, Unifying the People: A Qualitative Study of Lakota Leadership. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Nebraska. Linoln, Nebraska. July, 2009. Pages 14.]

“The primary method of investigation for this study was what I called a critical grounded theory, where critical is defined as initiating a change of perception on the part of the participants. This includes the college students and the in-service cooperating teachers. Because the goal of the study was to examine the success of the secondary music methods experience and use the data to make changes in the course and to see how the research process changed the attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs of the participants, ‘critical’ grounded theory was the appropriate label to describe the research design.” [Frank Abrahams, “Examining the Preservice Practicum Experience of Undergraduate Music Education Majors—Exploring Connections and Dispositions Through Multiple Perspectives A Critical Grounded Theory.” Journal of Music Teacher Education. Volume 19, number 1, 2009. Pages 80-92.]

“We argue in our book for grounding theory in social research itself—for generating it from the data. We have linked this position with a general method of comparative analysis—different from the more specific comparative methods now current—and with various procedures designed to generate grounded theory. Although our emphasis is on generating theory rather than verifying it, we take special pains not to divorce those two activities, both necessary to the scientific enterprise. Although our book is directed primarily at sociologists, we believe it can be useful to anyone who is interested in studying social phenomena—political, educational, economic, industrial, or whatever—especially if their studies are based on qualitative data.” [Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L, Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New Brunswick, New Jersey: AldineTransaction imprint of Transaction Publishers. 2006. Page viii.]

“Grounded theory methods provided the strategies for collecting and analyzing data …. Consistent with the emergent character of grounded theory methods, my analysis evolved as I collected and interpreted data. While completing a study of the experience chronic illness, I found that issues about having a problematic body arose repeatedly.” [Kathy Charmaz, “The Body, Identity, and Self: Adapting to Impairment.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 36, number 4, autumn 1995. Pages 657-680.]

“Anselm [Strauss] is perhaps best known for creating the grounded theory method with Barney G. Glaser. The remembrances collected here provide glimpses of how he taught this method and present views of his lasting influence on students. This influence began during his first class meeting with the first cohort of sociology doctoral students in 1968 and lasted until his death in 1996. At that first meeting, Anselm interviewed each one of us as though completing a research study. By the end of class, Anselm glowed with as much excitement as we felt. He told us that we were well chosen to embark on this venture, which turned out to be quite an adventure. After musing for a moment, he chuckled and said with relief, ‘There’s not a careerist among you.’” [Kathy Charmaz, “Teachings of Anselm Strauss: Remembrances and Reflections.” Sociological Perspectives. Volume 43, number 4, winter 2000. Pages S163-S174.]

“Grounded Theory is an inductive methodology which supports the systematic development of theory. This is in contrast to deductive methodology, which uses pre-determined theories to shape the analysis. Grounded theory is helpful when little is known about the area of investigation.” [Melanie S. George, “Stress in NHS staff triggers defensive inward-focussing and an associated loss of connection with colleagues: this is reversed by Schwartz Rounds.” George Journal of Compassionate Health Care. Volume 3, number 9, 2016. Pages 1-17.]

“What I am calling disability aesthetics names a critical concept that seeks to emphasize the presence of disability in the tradition of aesthetic representation. Disability aesthetics refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body—and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—as the sole determination of the aesthetic. It is not a matter of representing the exclusion of disability from aesthetic history, since such an exclusion has not taken place, but of making the influence of disability obvious. This goal may take two forms: 1) to establish disability as a critical framework that questions the presuppositions underlying definitions of aesthetic production and appreciation; 2) to establish disability as a significant value in itself worthy of future development. My claim is that the acceptance of disability enriches and complicates materialist notions of the aesthetic, while the rejection of disability limits definitions of artistic ideas and objects.” [Tobin Siebers, “Disability Aesthetics.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Volume 7, number 2, spring/summer 2006. Pages 63-73.]

“This paper examines the psycho-social dynamics of political correctness and political incorrectness through the lens of how people gain enjoyment through either stance, and how a desire for more authority speaks through both ‘tribes.’ …

“Our struggle is to move from the ‘obsessional desire’ of PC [politically correct] and PIC [politically incorrect] cultures (a desire that is impossible to fulfil) and to strive for ‘hysterical desires,’ a desire that is always unfulfilled. In failing to fulfil our desires and gain full enjoyment a new lack appears and we have the opportunity to be creative, to be engaged and productive, and to discover yet new desires to fill this gap and lack. We will then discover new forms of authority and structures adaptive to the network society. These will be forever imperfect, but will act as stepping stones to support social cohesion and development.”

[Simon Western, “Political Correctness and Political Incorrectness: A Psychoanalytic Study of New Authoritarians.” Organisational & Social Dynamics. Volume 16, number 1, spring 2016. Pages 68-84.]

“Most impressive for critical social discourses is the power of mindful practices, such as yoga, to shift consciousness away from ideology.… [M]indfulness is a prophylactic against implanted ideological scripts, or as Joel Spring … calls them, ‘wheels in the head.’ This yoga of critical discourse is a necessary counterbalance to the assault that is the current U.S. school reform agenda, which is part of a pervasive and accelerated competition, accumulation, and achievement orientation that exacerbates disease in the mind and body.…

“Language is the problem. Language traps people into dialectic; traps them into talking about self and other, where body is other. Language even separates people from themselves.”

[Andrea M. Hyde, “The Yoga of Critical Discourse.” Journal of Transformative Education. Volume 11, number 2, 2013. Pages 114-126.]

“… since the recession protest movements have had the addition of middle-income earners, youth and the elderly, joining with trade unions and activist groups. These protest movements have also extended their repertoire through a variety of tactics and direct actions, including, blockades, bank and government office ‘flash-mobs,’ the ‘squares occupations’ movement, and multiple forms of civil disobedience. As well, new forms of ‘whistle-blowing’ and computer ‘hacktivism’ have been directed against national governments, but also corporations, international financial institutions, free trade policies and state violence.

“It is this opposition that has been met by a ‘hardening’ of the state and the characterizations of a new phase of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism.’ This claim is based, in part, on the further strengthening of executive power and insulation of economic policy from parliamentary accountability that we noted above. But it also arises from the incredible multiplication of legalized restrictions and policing modalities for the disciplining of dissent by the ‘austerity state’ ….”

[Greg Albo and Carlo Fanelli. Austerity Against Democracy: An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism? Toronto, Ontario: Socialist Project. 2014. Page 21.]

“The narrow understanding of dialogism as argument, polemics, or parody. These are the externally most obvious, but crude, forms of dialogism. Confidence in another’s word, reverential reception (the authoritative word), apprenticeship, the search for and mandatory nature of deep meaning, agreement, its infinite gradations and shadings (but not its logical limitations and not purely referential reservations), the layering of meaning upon meaning, voice upon voice, strengthening through merging (but not identification), the combination of many voices (a corridor of voices) that augments understanding, departure beyond the limits of the understood, and so forth. These special relations can be reduced neither to the purely logical nor to the purely thematic. Here one encounters integral positions, integral personalities (the personality does not require extensive disclosure—it can be articulated in a single sound, revealed in a single word), precisely voices.” [M. M. Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Vern W. McGee, translator. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, editors. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1986. Page 121.]

“[Fyodor] Dostoevsky’s influence has still far from reached its culmination. The most essential and far-reaching aspects of his artistic vision, the revolution he brought about in the genre of the novel and in the area of literary art generally, have yet to be fully assimilated and realized. We are even today still being drawn into his dialogue on transient themes, but the dialogism he revealed to us, the dialogism of artistic thinking and of an artistic picture of the world, his new model of the internally dialogized world, has not yet been thoroughly examined. Socratic dialogue, which replaced tragic dialogue, was the first step in the history of the new genre of the novel. But that was mere dialogue, little more than an external form of dialogism.” [Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Caryl Emerson, translator and editor. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1984. Page 291.]

“Linguistics has not succeeded in mastering its object to the same degree in all areas: it is only beginning to master it in syntax, and with difficulty; very little is being done in the area of semantics; absolutely nothing has been elaborated in an area, the obligation of which is the study of large verbal entities (long utterances from everyday life, dialogue, the speech, the tract, the novel, and so on). These utterances also can and should be defined and studied linguistically, as phenomena of language. The examination of these phenomena in ancient bards and rhetoricians, and in their contemporary expression, poetics, cannot be considered scientific owing to the mixture noted above, of the linguistic perspective with those completely alien to it—logical, psychological, and aesthetic.” [Mikhail Mikhaylovich Bakhtin and Kenneth N. Brostrom, “Toward the Aesthetics of the Word.” Kenneth M. Brostrom, translator. Dispositio. Volume 4, number 11/12, summer–fall 1979. Pages 299-315.]

“As an optimal linguistic form for embodying this tendency, parataxic constructions, which migrated from colloquial speech into literary genres, and led to attenuation of the monologic and strengthening of the dialogic aspect of speech, facilitating the formation of new features in the universal structure of the language (… involving an increased tendency toward dialogism).” [Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics in Teaching Russian Language in Secondary School.” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology. Volume 42, number 6, November–December 2004. Pages 12–49.]

“Stated at the highest level of (quite hair-raising) abstraction, what can only uneasily be called [Mikhail M.] ‘Bakhtin’s philosophy’ is a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge; more particularly, it is one of several modern epistemologies that seek to grasp human behavior through the use humans make of language. Bakhtin’s distinctive place among these is specified by the dialogic concept of language he proposes as fundamental. For this reason, the term used in this book to refer to the interconnected set of concerns that dominate Bakhtin’s thinking is ‘dialogism’ ….

“Dialogue is an obvious master key to the assumptions that guided Bakhtin̠s work throughout his whole career: dialogue is present in one way or another throughout the notebooks he kept from his youth to his death at the age of 80.”

[Michael Holquist. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. 2ⁿᵈ edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 13-14.]

“Chronotope, ‘time–space’: [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin’s neologism is even more of a stranger to us than ‘dialogism’; the latter is at least in the dictionary. Perhaps that is why, at least in anglophone contexts, it has not been given the welcome accorded to that category or to ‘carnival,’ a phenomenon from the margins which is licensed now in our studies no less than on our streets (in both cases with unobtrusive policing). We think we know where we are with ‘novel’ – naming as it does that generic upstart which made good, and which is somehow peculiarly ours as heirs to its ‘great (English) tradition’ – only to find that this home ground becomes slippery and that Bakhtin means disturbingly more by that term than we could have guessed.” [Graham Pechey. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 82.]

“The present article investigates the development of the concept of dialogue in [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin’s thought and aims to analyse the nature of the potential influence Bakhtin’s contemporaries in Soviet linguistics may have exerted on his thinking on the dialogical nature of language. At the same time, I try to demonstrate that questions of originality as well as the concept of influence are problematic from the point of view of the historiography of linguistics. The basic question is what counts as criteria for influence and how we can determine the nature as well as extent of potential influence. While there exist obvious parallels between the writings by Bakhtin and the representatives of the early Soviet sociology of language – which are supported by ample textual evidence – it seems that the Bakhtinian conception of language is qualitatively different and, therefore, cannot be reduced into its possible sources. It will be argued that this is also the case with the notion of dialogue which was discussed by Bakhtin’s contemporaries in Soviet linguistics.” [Mika Lähteenmäki, “Two Faces of Originality: On the origins of the concept of dialogue.” Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin. Stockholm University. Stockholm, Sweden. June 3rd–4th, 2009. Pages 273-280.]

“… the overuse of Bakhtinian terminology in cultural studies is nowadays likely to lead into a kind of embarrassment outside Bakhtinology proper as well. At times, it seems that any subject worthy of interest in academic conversation is either carnivalistic and grotesque or at least dialogic in the broad, Bakhtinian sense of the term. However, instead of dismissing various fashionable (mis)interpretations of [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin in contemporary cultural studies, I would like to argue that these (mis)appropriations, nevertheless, bring into focus some key problems in our (post)modernity. Put crudely, even a cursory glance at commercial rhetoric related to modern information technologies suffices to convince us that in the best of possible postindustrial information societies, things must be dialogical.” [Kari Matilainen, “Bakhtin and Modernity: Crisis of the Architectonic, Crisis of the Dialogic, Crisis of the Carnivalesque.” Dialogues on Bakhtin: Interdisciplinary Readings. Mika Lähteenmäki and Hannele Dufva, editors. Jyväskylä, Finland: University Printing House. 1998. Pages 36-52.]

“Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 – 1975), the Russian philosopher of language, developed a social theory that emphasizes performance, history, actuality, and the openness of dialogue from dialectical or partitive thinking to dialogical or relational thinking. Difference, variety, and alterity were the focus of Bakhtin’s attention because he wished to find connections with all degrees of plurality and otherness. His notions are quite appropriate to the search for human conversation over space and time, that is, the search for dialogical resonance in regions.” [M. Folch-Serra, “Place, voice, space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical-landscape.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Volume 8, number 3, September 1990. Pages 255-274.]

“The dialogical self proposes a far-reaching decentralization of both the concept of self and the concept of culture. At the intersection between the psychology of the self in the tradition of William James and the dialogical school in the tradition of Mikhail Bakhtin, the proposed view challenges both the idea of a core, essential self and the idea of a core, essential culture. In apparent contradiction with such a view, the present viewpoint proposes to conceive self and culture as a multiplicity of positions among which dialogical relationships can be established. Particular attention is paid to collective voices, domination and asymmetry of social relations, and embodied forms of dialogue. Cultures and selves are seen as moving and mixing and as increasingly sensitive to travel and translocality. Three perspectives for future research of self and culture are briefly discussed: the shifting attention from core to contact zones; increasing complexity; and the experience of uncertainty.…

“For Bakhtin, the notion of dialogue opens the possibility of differentiating the inner world of one and the same individual in the form of an interpersonal relationship. The transformation of an ‘inner’ thought of a particular character into an utterance enables dialogical relations to occur between this utterance and the utterance of imaginal others.”

[Hubert J. M. Hermans, “The Dialogical Self: Toward a Theory of Personal and Cultural Positioning.” Culture & Psychology. Volume 7, number 3, 2001. Pages 243-281.]

“On the interface of the modern (enlightened) and the postmodern self, DST [Dialogical Self Theory] proposes a partly decentralized conception of the self conceiving it as multi-voiced and dialogical. More specifically, the dialogical self is described in terms of a dynamic multiplicity of I – positions or voices in the landscape of the mind, intertwined as this mind is with the minds of other people. In this conception the different, independent positions are related by a continuous I and brought into communication with each other via dialogical activities ….” [Hubert J. M. Hermans, “The dialogical self in education: Introduction.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology. Volume 26, issue 2, 2013. Pages 81-89.]

“I elaborated on the notion of the extended self by reading [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin’s (1929/1973) book on [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky, in which he introduced the intriguing metaphor of the polyphonic novel. Such a novel is composed of a number of independent and mutually opposing perspectives embodied by characters involved in dialogical relationships. Each of the characters is seen as ‘ideologically authoritative and independent,’ that is, each of them is perceived as the author of his or her own view of the world, rather than an object of Dostoyevsky’s all-encompassing artistic vision.” [Hubert J. M. Hermans, “Dialogical Self Theory and the Increasing Multiplicity of I-Positions in a Globalizing Society: An Introduction.” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Number 137, fall 2012. Pages 1-21.]

“One of the most significant features of dialogical self theory is that it is not restricted to the boundaries of traditional disciplines and subdisciplines. The theory is devised in the conviction that insight into the workings of the human self requires cross-fertilization between different scientific fields.…

“The question may be posed whether the fertility of dialogical self theory as a conceptual system for analyzing a variety of phenomena in divergent fields of thought is sufficiently in balance with its empirical applications.”

[Hubert J. M. Hermans, “How to Perform Research on the Basis of Dialogical Self Theory? Introduction to the Special Issue.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology. Volume 21, issue 3, June 2008. Pages 185-199.]

“… we propose ‘I-positions’ and dialogical self theory …, in concert with discursive methodology, as a flexible framework for understanding the complex identity creating function of multiple and opposing positions in relation to buying sex.” [Adam M. Crossley and Rebecca Lawthom, “Dialogical Demand: Discursive Position Repertoires for a Local and Global UK Sex Industry.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 45, issue 2, 2014. Pages 261-286.]

“For present purposes, relationalism refers primarily to a standpoint in social psychology. This standpoint is premised on the threefold claim that ‘persons exist by virtue of individuals’ relations to others; that, cognately, ‘selves’ are an emergent property of semiotic I-You-Me systems …; and that therefore the task for social psychology is to identify ‘regularities’ of interrelations between specific cultural practices and particular experiences of self.… A similar theme can be found in [Hubert J. M.] Hermans’ Dialogical Self theory ….” [Raya A. Jones, “Relationalism through Social Robotics.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 43, issue 4, 2013. Pages 405-424.]

“Drawing from Dialogical Self Theory and from cosmopolitanism, we propose that adequately responding to the ethical and identity challenges presented by globalization requires having Global Consciousness: ‘a knowledge of both the interconnectedness and difference of humankind, and a will to take moral actions in a reflexive manner on its behalf.’ We argue that this approach can ground a distinctively normative psychology of globalization. We consider negative and positive aspects of the golden rule in equal and close relationships, and benevolence in unequal power relationships as behaviour guides for global consciousness, and theorize about institutional leadership that supports the provision of public goods. We offer empirical tests of this approach.…

“At its core, the dialogical view of self is characterized by four main features: 1) a representation of the perspectives of the other within the self, 2) a combination of plurality and unity regarding those perspectives, 3) an awareness that perspectives are responsive to dominance and social power, and 4) an awareness of the spatial and embodied nature of those perspectives.…

“… The negative rights/duties implied by the Confucian form of the Golden Rule are particularly useful in managing behaviour where high cultural distance between groups is involved. It is a cautious form of ethics that is more prevention-focused (avoiding mistakes, suppressing negative affect, being correct) than the positive (dialogical, loving, but prone to conflict) form of the Golden Rule articulated in Christianity and in Dialogical Self Theory.”

[James H. Liu and Matthew MacDonald, “Towards a Psychology of Global Consciousness: Through an Ethical Conception of Self in Society.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 3, 2016. Pages 310-334.]

“If we are to discard the production/consumption metaphor, the question arises, What kind of an object is a particular film? The move I want to suggest is a shift from film-as-text to a model of film-as-utterance, in the sense used by [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin ….” [Bhrigupati Singh, “Narrating Injustice: British Cultural Studies and Its Media.” Television & News Media. Volume 7, number 2, May 2006. Pages 135-153.]

“… a discussion of [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin’s notion of ‘realism’ shows how the self is social at an embodied plane in which inter-subjective exchange is anchored. When we refer to the embodied plane, we are referring to the experiential livedness of life into which people find themselves thrown. That is, we seek to account for experiential immediacy of life that is exemplified in instances such as an immediate revulsion at the grotesque, a breathless arrest at the sublime, an irresistible care and commitment to another, and so on. Revisiting Bakhtin makes us aware how this aspect of psychology is lacking in Dialogical Self theory as [Hubert J. M.] Hermans conceives of it.” [James Cresswell and Cor Baerveldt, “Bakhtin’s realism and embodiment: Towards a revision of the dialogical self.” Culture & Psychology. Volume 17, number 2, 2011. Pages 263-277.]

“When Socialist Realism had its opening night in 1934, Mikhail Bakhtin, an internally exiled critic, saw the festive energy of the masses reduced to the vicarious pathos of the spectator. But he also realized that the democracy which opposed this was not a matter of inviting the people to play a part in Western liberalism’s comedy of manners. The popular culture which he championed and theorized was a drama in which power was forced out of the wings and onto the stage where it could be displayed, mocked, contested and transformed. Bakhtin is perhaps the only major contributor to Marxist cultural theory for whom popular culture is the privileged bearer of democratic and progressive values.” [Ken Hirschkop, “Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy.” New Left Review. Series I, number 160, November–December 1986. Pages 92-113.]

“Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin were very different types of thinkers. While the former spent the 1920s maximally involved in the Italian revolutionary movement as leader of the Communist Party, the latter, living in Petrograd at the time of the revolution and throughout the second half of the 1920s, reflected on the experience in religious and philosophical rather than political ways. In the 1930s, while Gramsci languished in [Benito] Mussolini’s prison, theorizing the process by which the revolutionary party could achieve hegemony and seize political power, Bakhtin was internally exiled in Kazakhstan where he taught in an obscure pedagogical institute and wrote erudite essays on the anti-hegemonic potentialities of the novel in the cultural arena.” [Craig Brandist, “Gramsci, Bakhtin and the Semiotics of Hegemony.” New Left Review. Series I, number 216, March–April 1996. Pages 94-109.]

“Many have seen in [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin’s theory of the novel something relevant for a wide variety of disciplines, from literary studies, narrowly defined, to political theory and anthropology. Accordingly, it has been noted that the theory incorporates an ideal history of literary forms, a philosophy of culture, a typology of discursive relations, and a theory of conflicting social forces. The sources of such a wide-ranging theory seem to be diverse: from Marburg Neo-Kantianism [i.e., a school of neo-Kantianism] to Russian Formalism, Marxist political theory and classical aeshetics.” [Craig Brandist, “Bakhtin, Cassirer and symbolic forms.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 85, September/October 1997. Pages 20-27.]

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, when poststructuralism set the agenda in cultural theory and shaped the way in which theorists from other traditions were received, the work of the Bakhtin Circle was often seen as anticipating contemporary concerns to a quite uncanny extent. While some adopted [Mikhail M.] Bakhtin as a poststructuralist avant la lettre [literally, ‘before the letter,’ i.e., before the term ‘poststructuralism’ was coined], others seized on Bakhtinian ideas as an alternative way of dealing with the very issues poststructuralism had raised without disappearing into the poststructuralist void of [Jacques] Derrida’s ‘outside text’ or partaking of [Michel] Foucault’s metaphysics of power. Gradually, it became apparent that despite a reiterated adherence to the ‘concrete event’ and ‘social context,’ Bakhtinian theory was itself as thoroughly anti-realist as the poststructuralists themselves.” [Craig Brandist, “Neo-Kantianism in cultural theory: Bakhtin, Derrida and Foucault.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 102, July/August 2000. Pages 6-16.]

“The relationships between economic theory and economic history, as well as the relationship between both and the historical process, are examined as problems in scientific method and in the sociology of knowledge. Seeing the root of the failure of both approaches to the study of society in their implicit (or explicit) acceptance of the unreconciled antinomy of subject and object of knowledge, the author rejects the worn formula ‘history without theory is dead—theory without history is empty’ as a merely verbal, artificial solution of the difficulty. A genuine way out is attainable only through a radical dissolution of that antinomy itself by recognizing the dialectical unity of subject and object. As the key to the vexing ontological problem is bound to remain forever inaccessible to purely contemplative endeavors, social practice forms the only medium of adequate knowledge of society. Thus the principle of unity of object and subject shades into the corollary maxim of unity of theory and practice.” [Paul A. Baran, “The Dialectic of Social Science.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 62, issue 1, May 2010. Pages 37-38.]

“Postmodernism’s rejection of metanarratives can be seen as symptomatic of the theoretical inability to construct a mass solidaristic oppositional transformatory political project, and that it is based on the refusal to recognise the validity or existence of solidaristic social class. More importantly, this general theoretical shortcoming is politically disabling because the effect of eschewing mass solidaristic policy is, in effect, supporting a reactionary status quo. Both as an analysis and as a vision, post-modernism has its dangers – but more so as a vision. It fragments and denies economic, social, political, and cultural relations. In particular, it rejects the solidaristic metanarratives of neo-Marxism and socialism. It thereby serves to disempower the oppressed and to uphold the hegemonic Radical Right in their privileging of individualism and in their stress on patterns and relations of consumption as opposed to relations of production. Postmodernism analysis, in effect if not in intention, justifies ideologically the current Radical Right economic, political, and educational project.” [Dave Hill, “Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and ‘Race’: Critical Race Theory, Equivalence/Parallelist Theory, and Marxist Theory.” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice. 2009. Pages 1-52.]

“Empowerment is a construct that links individual strengths and competencies, natural helping systems, and proactive behaviors to social policy and social change …. Empowerment theory, research, and intervention link individual well-being with the larger social and political environment. Theoretically, the construct connects mental health to mutual help and the struggle to create a responsive community. It compels us to think in terms of wellness versus illness, competence versus deficits, and strength versus weaknesses.… Empowerment-oriented interventions enhance wellness while they also aim to ameliorate problems, provide opportunities for participants to develop knowledge and skills, and engage professionals as collaborators instead of authoritative experts.” [Douglas D. Perkins and Marc A. Zimmerman, “Empowerment Theory, Research, and Application.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 23, issue 5, January 1995. Pages 569-579.]

“… critical gerogogy was still not embedded in a dialectical context that includes the simultaneous interplay of reflection and action…. The aim of this article is to integrate critical gerogogy within a praxeological epistemology as a continual reconstruction of thought and action in the lived experience of older people. Its objective is to advance the development of critical gerogogy by bringing together critical reflective processes with actual experiences in order to offer more workable principles for the practice of critical gerogogy.” [Marvin Formosa, “Critical Gerogogy: developing practical possibilities for critical educational gerontology.” Education and Ageing. Volume 17, number 1, 2002. Pages 73-86.]

“In the current conjuncture there is much talk about ‘the collapse of globalism’ and a move ‘beyond the Washington Consensus’ as the dominant global neo-liberal order enters a crisis of legitimacy. It is thus a good moment to (re)engage with the genealogy and current prospects for a critical development theory or, rather, theories. In the 1990s, capitalist triumphalism saw the neoliberal approach to development in unchecked full flow and it seemed that ‘there was no alternative’ as the gurus of neoliberalism preached. Now we are presented with an opportunity to offer development alternatives that would have real popular purchase. Critical theory’s embrace of a ‘post-development’ which read the whole development enterprise as illusion left no viable challengers to orthodox development theory in the field. While state-led development in the traditional mode, including its radical variant, had little purchase in an increasingly internationalised world order, the issue of development as theory and practice to overcome poverty and inequality has not gone away as a vital global concern. The question today is whether a revitalised critical development theory can meet these challenges.…

“Critical theory, in its broadest or ecumenical sense, could be said to start with [Karl] Marx, continuing via the Frankfurt School to reach the present, via [Michel] Foucault, in the shape of feminism, ecology and post-colonialism amongst other liberatory pulses. Critical theory is, in essence, concerned with the critique of modernity.”

[Ronaldo Munck, “Critical Development Theory: Results and Prospects.” Migración y Desarrollo. Number 14, 2010. Pages 33-53.]

“Logically, there is no reason to distinguish between the reality of a molecule, and atom, or an ion, or more generally between the whole and its parts. There is no more magic behind the fact that groups have properties of their own, which are different from the properties of their subgroups or their individual members, than behind the fact that molecules have properties, which are different from the properties of the atoms or ions of which they are composed” [Kurt Lewin, “Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and Social Change.” Human Relations. Volume 1, number 5, 1947. Page 8.]

“This book contends that changes in black musical style and mass consumer preferences offer a useful insight into the changing sense of self, community and destiny among those blacks who rarely left the sorts of evidence, or undertook the sorts of activities, to which historians are generally most responsive.…

“The book is also guided by the belief that the popular cultures of oppressed groups usually contain within them—explicitly or implicitly—a critique of the system by which those groups are oppressed, and thus actually constitute a mode of psychological resistance to their predicament. Yet this is a complicated and elusive business. As we shall see, black Rhythm and Blues, as art and commerce, politics and entertainment, was also deeply inscribed with many of the social, sexual, moral, economic and even racial values of the dominant culture. Ultimately, the story of Rhythm and Blues reveals the inadequacy of both excessive romanticizations of the counter-hegemonic power of black popular culture, and of Frankfurt School-style critiques of mass culture which reduce it to little more than a succession of profitable commodities whose main function is to reinforce and perpetuate existing configurations of social, sexual, political and economic power. In fact, Rhythm and Blues was a complex, often deeply paradoxical phenomenon which managed both to challenge and affirm the core values and assumptions of mainstream America.”

[Brian Ward. Just my soul responding: Rhythm and Blues, black consciousness and race relations. London and New York: UCL Press imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 4.]

“Circularly, the commons and the public sphere require adequate leisure. To restore a social world independent of the market and the workplace, and to keep the commons vital, we need the leisure time to inhabit the commons. We also need our communities to have time to be there with us—hanging on the porch chatting, shooting hoops at the rec center, jamming in the basement. In other words, we need both a vital cultural commons beyond the world of paid labor and we need a leisure ethic, a constant challenge to the very concept and valorization of work. A leisure ethic and the public commons depend on each other. And for both of these, collectivity is key. With the communal revalorization of leisure, by pushing back against the constant attempts of capital to encroach on work-free time and the unmonetized forms of everyday life and community, we take up the most foundational struggle, the struggle against work itself.” [Eva Swidler, “Radical Leisure.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 2, June 2016. Pages 26-34.]

“No religious group has been more involved in sectarian civil religious action than the Quakers, and this insight holds as true for Britain as it does for the United States. As one scholar observed, ‘Friends, in fulfillment of their peace testimony, have remained at the core of nearly every important twentieth-century peace organization and, indeed, in every movement that defends and insists upon the sanctity of human life.’ What makes Quaker radicalism worthy scrutiny is its religious basis. In the three and a half centuries since its founding, Quakerism has opposed an array of governmentally sancioned policies on religious grounds.” [Stephan A. Kent and James V. Spickard, “The ‘Other’ Civil Religion and the Tradition of Radical Quaker Politics.” Journal of Church and State. Volume 36, number 2, spring 1994. Pages 373-387.]

“This book centers in what we call a ‘propaganda model,’ an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. it is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” [Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2002. Kindle edition.]

“Over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly commonplace to describe the United States as an ‘hegemonic power.’ While there are some important differences in the way various theoretical traditions understand the notion of hegemony, which will be explored in detail below, it is generally taken to refer to the dominant power of a particular era and its capacity to shape the international system of that time. That the US has come to be described as hegemonic is indicative of just how powerful most observers consider it to be in comparison with other countries in the contemporary international system. This is somewhat surprising for two reasons: first, for much of the 1980s, and even into the 1990s, it was commonly assumed that the US was in permanent decline ….” [Mark Beeson, “United States Hegemony.” International Encyclopedia of Public Policy: Volume 1—Global Governance and Development. Phillip Anthony O’Hara, editor. Perth, Australia: GPERU imprint of Global Political Economy Research Unit. 2011. Page 533-542.]

“This article examines the assumptions that underlie Noam Chomsky’s politics and argues that his analysis of US foreign policy since World War II may best be situated within the realist tradition in international relations. Chomsky’s left realism has not been adequately understood or addressed by IR [international relations] scholars for both political and disciplinary reasons. In opposition to most classical realists, he has insisted that intellectuals should resist rather than serve national power interests. In contrast to most political scientists, he has also refused to theorize, critiquing much of the enterprise of social science in terms of what he sees as highly suspect power interests within the academy. Hostility to Chomsky’s normative commitments has consequently prevented IR scholars from discerning key aspects of his project, as well as important historical and theoretical continuities between radical and realist thought.” [Ronald Osborn, “Noam Chomsky and the realist tradition.” Review of International Studies. Abstract. Volume 35, 2009. Pages 351-370.]

“… left realist work has provided promising directions for understanding the landscape of woman abuse beyond the criminal justice system. FR [father’s rights] groups provide a vital location for exploring the influence of formal and informal factors in producing this form of crime. In order to be true to the realities of crime in general and the experiences of abused women in particular, it is necessary to broaden our focus beyond the criminal justice system primarily connoted by references to law and order.” [Molly Dragiewicz, “A left realist approach to antifeminist fathers’ rights groups.” Crime, Law and Social Change. Volume 54, 2010. Pages 197-212.]

“Left realism in the UK emerged during the early 1980s as a policy-oriented intervention focusing on the reality of crime for the working class victim and the need to elaborate a socialist alternative to conservative emphases on ‘law and order’ ….

“On the left there was a confrontation with what was polemically termed ‘Left Idealism,’ a criminology which saw the criminality of the poor as a combination of media induced ‘moral panic’ and criminalisation by ruling elites of what were in effect primitive forms of rebellion ….”

[John Lea, “Left Realism, community and state-building.” Crime, Law and Social Change. Volume 54, 2010. Pages 141-158.]

“Left Realism, which can be traced to early dissatisfaction with what was considered to be an idealistic portrayal of the criminal as a proto-revolutionary actor, gained traction among a handful of criminologists who had gathered at the National Deviancy Conference in the UK in 1968.” [Shahid Alvi, “Recognizing New Realities: A Left Realist perspective on the YCJA.” Canadian Criminal Law Review. Volume 18, issue 3, October 2014. Pages 341-358.]

“Left realism began life in the 1980s, when critical criminology was heavily concerned with white collar and corporate crime, with a beginning interest in state crime. Others on the left were arguing that the very definitions of crime, and the notions of who commits crime, are shaped by both class and race interests in North America and Europe.” [Martin D. Schwartz and Walter S. DeKeseredy, “The current health of left realist theory.” Crime, Law and Social Change. Volume 54, 2010. Pages 107-110.]

“This chapter analyzes the origins of genocide as a global-historical phenomenon, providing a sense, however fragmentary, of genocide’s frequency through history. It then turns to examine the origin and evolution of the concept itself, and explore some ‘contested cases’ that test the boundaries of the genocide framework. No chapter in the book tries to cover so much ground, and the discussion at points may seem complicated and confusing, so please fasten your seatbelts.…

“A vivid example of this mindset is the text that underpins the cultural tradition common to most readers of this book: the biblical Old Testament. This frequently depicts God, as one commentator put it, as ‘a despotic and capricious sadist,’ and his followers as génocidaires (genocidal killers). The trend starts early on, in the Book of Genesis (6: 17–19), where God decides ‘to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven,’ with the exception of Noah and a nucleus of human and animal life. Elsewhere, ‘the principal biblical rationale for genocide is the danger that God’s people will be infected (by intermarriage, for example) by the religious practices of the people who surround them. They are to be a holy people – i.e., a people kept apart, separated from their idolatrous neighbors.”

[Adam Jones. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 3-4.]

“Given such pervasive violence, it is astonishing that discussions of police brutality so frequently focus on the behavior of individual officers. Commonly called the ‘Rotten Apple’ theory, the explanation of police misconduct favored by police commanders and their ideological allies holds that police abuse is exceptional, that the officers who misuse their power are a tiny minority, and that it is unfair to judge other cops (or the department as a whole) by the misbehavior of the few. This is a handy tool for diverting attention away from the institution, its structure, practices, and social role, pushing the blame, instead, onto some few of its agents. It is, in other words, a means of protecting the organization from scrutiny, and of avoiding change.

“Despite the official insistence to the contrary, it is clear that police organizations, as well as individual officers, hold a large share of the responsibility for the prevalence of police brutality. Police agencies are organizationally complex, and brutality may be promoted or accommodated within any (or all) of its various dimensions. Both formal and informal aspects of an organization can help create a climate in which unnecessary violence is tolerated, or even encouraged. Among the formal aspects contributing to violence are the organization’s official policies, its identified priorities, the training it offers its personnel, its allocation of resources, and its system of promotions, awards, and other incentives.”

[Kristian Williams. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press. 2007. Page 21.]

“Public disorder remains a constant threat because political order is fragile, and the armed forces in Africa are always a potential threat to those in power, given their access to weapons and discipline. A consideration of their relations has to be included in any critique of policing and national development, although the rôle of the police in the maintenance of civil order has been obscured by their secondary involvement in coups (as in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone in the 1960s), and by their often paramilitary nature. The latter is a reflection of both their historical legacy and environment.” [Alice Hills, “Towards a Critique of Policing and National Development in Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies. Volume 34, number 2, June 1996. Pages 271-291.]

“Obviously there are many possible versions of materialist naturalism, and endlessly many ways of departing from it. Insofar as [Friedrich] Engels’ account suggests the contrary, it is philosophically naïve and misleading. But Engels’ real purpose is to focus attention on the opposition between a materialist outlook, based on naturalism, and its most popular, influential and adamant opponent, a traditional religious outlook, whose chief tenets are that the natural world was created by an extramundane Deity and that souls are immortal. If an ‘idealist’ is someone who believes that the world as a whole is mind-dependent (in other words, someone who rejects realism), then Engels is even within his rights in describing this dominant anti-materialist view as ‘idealism.’ For orthodox theism does hold that God is a mind and that everything besides God is wholly dependent for its being and nature on God’s mental activity (his creative knowledge and will). Engels’ rather manichean distinction between idealism and materialism may be simplistic and philosophically unsophisticated, but it is not wholly misguided.” [Allen W. Wood. Karl Marx. 2ⁿᵈ edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Page 167.]

“The ‘agrarian question,’ then, is indicative of one of the most important aspects of the history of Bolshevism, because it highlights the fundamental differences between Russia and European countries where communism had also played a certain role. Bolshevism was invented by Lenin for agrarian and highly authoritarian tsarist Russia: that was where it started. But Russia was—in terms of social structure, economic conditions and political system—so different from western European countries that local communisms arising there would inevitably be different. Whether leftist or syndicalist, anarchist or utopian, the most important driving force in left movements in Europe was something else: at the root of communism outside Russia lay the horrific experience of the First World War, and the deep disappointment about what was considered to have been the utter failure of the working-class movement to prevent the war, or at least to have reconstructed a new and just society out of the disaster of war.” [Andreas Wirsching, “Comparing local communisms.” Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History. Issue 5, 2013. Pages 21-40.]

“Certainly, more than two decades after the ‘linguistic turn,’ historians of communism should take more seriously the language of ideology, both as a comprehensive system of meaning and as a determining influence on historical actors. What individuals themselves ‘believed’ or ‘intended’ is, after all, scarcely a question that can be resolved anyway. Therefore any analysis of interwar communism should take as its basis the broad unity between word and deed, and between propaganda and action. To this end, the article will first offer some general thoughts on the possibilities of a ‘linguistic turn’ with regard to research into communism, before going on to examine problems of the linguistic formation of violence as a central, not reducible, feature of communism. From such a point of departure, the final section will address some concrete examples of violence and counter-violence at the end of the Weimar Republic.” [Andreas Wirsching, “Violence as discourse? For a ‘linguistic turn’ in communist history.” Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History. Volume 2, issue 1, May 2010. Pages 12-39.]

“The four new features of the current stage of capitalism – hyperfinancialization, the closer connection between ownership and management and the behavioral incentives it provides, autophagic accumulation in both the developed and developing worlds, and the emergence of carrying-capacity environmental limitations on capitalist accumulation – have intensified capitalism’s contradictions and carry implications for revolutionary struggle as urgent as those of the features of [Vladimir] Lenin’s Imperialism. To mention merely the most compelling: the working classes of the industrialized world are positioned to resume their place at the vanguard of revolution. The immiseration of the working class in the developed world has resumed and heightened under the impact of hyperfinancialization, and the priorities of finance capital have substantially increased the reserve army of labor, which further creates opportunities for proletarian action. The environmental crises will not touch merely the developing world, but pose survival questions for the advanced working classes of the capitalist center: the effects of climate change on agriculture and the fact that peak oil means that capitalism will not have the necessary resources available under its mode of production to deal with those effects endanger all working people globally.” [Greg Rose, “Beyond Imperialism? Have We Reached a New Stage of Capitalism?” Political Affairs: Marxism Fresh Daily. August 7th, 2012. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] is a member-run union for all workers, a union dedicated to organizing on the job, in our industries and in our communities. IWW members are organizing to win better conditions today and build a world with economic democracy tomorrow. We want our workplaces run for the benefit of workers and communities rather than for a handful of bosses and executives.

“We are the Industrial Workers of the World because we organize industrially.

“This means we organize all workers producing the same goods or providing the same services into one union, rather than dividing workers by skill or trade, so we can pool our strength to win our demands together. Since the IWW was founded in 1905, we have made significant contributions to the labor struggles around the world and have a proud tradition of organizing across gender, ethnic and racial lines – a tradition begun long before such organizing was popular.”

[Editor, “About the IWW.” Industrial Workers of the World: A Union for All Workers. Undated. Retrieved on September 19th, 2015.]

“… the local IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] was doing a lot of organizing. While some of us had prior experience in organizing pickets and direct actions, the Starbucks Workers campaign, the Jimmy John’s campaign, the Sisters Camelot Canvas Union, and the Chicago-Lake Liquors campaigns all provided early experience and training in planning and executing pickets and direct actions, in a context where we were already committed to IWW ideas and practices. Some of these were particularly challenging, such as doing intelligence and the occasional flying picket of scab canvassers in the Sisters Camelot campaign. Since they never stayed put, it felt like a throwback to the 1934 strikes and the flying pickets. It was cold both Winters.” [Erik Davis, “Building Working-Class Defense Organizations: An Interview with the Twin Cities GDC.” The Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee Local 14. Minneapolis, Minnesota. December, 2016. Pages 1-11.]

“Founded in 1905 as both an industrial union and revolutionary organization, the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], or Wobblies, as members were often called, pledged to organize the workers of the world regardless of race, ethnicity, skill level, or sex. Indeed, in several western towns, including Grays Harbor, women radicals joined—and led—IWW locals. IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn even went so for as to argue that the IWW’s decentralized structure freed female labor militants to be more active during strikes, writing: ‘Women can be the most militant or most conservative element in a strike, in proportion to their comprehension of its purposes. The IWW has been accused of putting the women in the front. The truth is, the IWW does not keep them in the back, and they go to the front.’” [Aaron Goings, “Women, Wobblies & the War of Grays Harbor.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History. Volume 64, number 4, winter 2014. Pages 3-21 and 89-91.]

“As an assertion of such a basic human right as having a history, in many ways this dissertation is an attempt to give voice to the dismembered past. Historical actors who have run counter to traditional American narratives often have their body of “evidence” disjointed or completely dislocated from the story of our nation. This type of disremembering creates an artificial recollection of our collective past, which dearticulates past class struggles from contemporary groups seeking social justice in the present. Class-conscious historical actors, immigrants, women, the GLBTQ [Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer/Questioning] community, and people of color have the right to be remembered on their own terms using historical sources and resources they produced. Therefore, similar to the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] and its rank-and-file, this dissertation seeks to fan the flames of discontented historical memory by offering a working-class perspective of the 1916 Strike that seeks to interpret the actions, events, people, and places of the strike in new ways. This dissertation is a statement of a fundamental human right—having a history—and the research, writing, and methodological means toward this end are a unique critical perspective developed specifically with this goal in mind.” [Gary Kaunonen. The Fanned Flames of Discontent: A Solidarity-Inspired History of the Identity/Ideology, Cultural History, and Rhetorical Strategies of the Wobblies During the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. Ph.D. dissertation. Michigan Technological University. Houghton, Michigan. 2015. Page 15.]

“I call … ‘mediology’ the discipline that treats of the higher social functions in their relations with the technical structures of transmission. I call ‘mediological method’ the case-by-case determination of correlations, verifiable if possible, between the symbolic activities of a human group (religion, ideology, literature, art, etc.), its forms of organization, and its mode of grasping and archiving traces and putting them into circulation. I take for a working hypothesis that this last level exerts a decisive influence on the first two. The symbolic productions of a society at a given instant cannot be explained independently of the technologies of memory in use at the same instant. This is to say that a dynamics of thought is not separable from a physics of traces.” [Régis Debray. Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms. Eric Rauth, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1996. Page 11.]

“While a communication society will value the disposable, mutable, and instantaneously accessible, the depth of time rounds out the things that are transmissible and gives them relief and dimension. In the one case, continuance is only an accident; in the other, it is crucial. The evanescence of a message will compromise an act of transmission, but it will not disqualify a communication. Within the nascent discipline of mediology one has the habit of distinguishing among messages according to their material natures as sounds, sights, written words, audiovisual sequences, and so on. From the vantage of cultural significance, however, the fact that a givensense perception is objectified and safeguarded indurable form matters more than the particular faculty in question (hearing, vision, etc.). The information’s recovery and repetition counts for more than the channel cartying it or its specific material nature.” [Régis Debray. Transmitting Culture. Eric Rauth, translator. New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Page 4.]

“The notion of spectacle drifts as an entelechy [vital principle] above cultures, an entity lacking all history and economy, without borders or geography. A phantasmagorical notion, colossal and sauntering, it fuels spontaneous faith in the existence of a universal history of the image, of looking, or of recording sound, uniformly imposing itself in every nook and cranny of the so-called ‘global village.’ Islam is no ‘society of the spectacle’—nor is the West, by the way—but for historical reasons that belong to it alone. The billion human beings which constitute it have their own specific ‘ideology,’ their own cultural mediology; this also holds for Buddhism and Confucianism. The interconnectedness of technological networks, far from weakening these religious identities, reanimate and redefine them.” [Régis Debray, “Remarks on the Spectacle.” New Left Review. Series I, number 214, November–December 1995. Pages 134-141.]

“… mediological periodization allows us to situate the life-cycle of socialism, that great fallen oak of political endeavour, within the last 150 years of the graphosphere; and to explore its ecosystem, so to speak, through its processes of propagation. Socialism will not be treated here in terms of the intrinsic value of any of its branches. Rather, the aim will be to grasp the common mediological basis that underlies all its doctrinal ramifications … by approaching it as an ensemble composed of men (militants, leaders, theoreticians), tools of transmission (books, schools, newspapers), and institutions (factions, parties, associations). The ecosystem takes the form of a particular sociotope, a milieu for the reproduction of certain kinds of life and thought. The professional typographer occupies a special niche within it, the key link between proletarian theory and the working-class condition; herein lay the best technical means of intellectualizing the proletariat and proletarianizing the intellectual, the double movement that constituted the workers’ parties. For a printer is quintessentially a ‘worker intellectual or an intellectual worker,’ the very ideal of that human type who would become the pivot of socialism: ‘the conscious proletarian.’” [Régis Debray, “Socialism: A Life Cycle.” New Left Review. Series II, number 46, July–August 2007. Pages 5-28.]

“Presentism, feeding on flashes and clips, is strategic non-realism, since it obliterates past and future. Looking forward, there is no evaluation of the medium- and long-term consequences of immediate decisions, which typically turn out contrary to the envisaged goal—Sunni Iraq falling under the control of pro-Iranian Shi’ism being the paradigm. Emotional presentism undermines strategic intelligence. Looking back, locked in its muddled and volcanic moralism, the presentist West brushes aside the memories of others and the humiliations it has subjected them to. The dominated always have a longer memory than the dominators.” [Régis Debray, “Decline of the West?” New Left Review. Series II, number 80, March–April 2013. Pages 29-44.]

“The global media coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II evoked for some commentators the prophecy, attributed to Malraux, that ‘the 21ˢᵗ century will be religious or it will not be’. Yet which of the thirty centuries that have left a written record has not been religious? The enlightened 18ᵗʰ, perhaps; but only superficially. Like many atheists, Malraux himself was profoundly religious. He knew that science cannot create bonds between people; that the relationships between human consciousnesses are imaginary—or they are not. The resurgence of sacramental passions in the late 20th century should surprise only those who espoused the naive 19th century credo, that the progress of science and technology would drive away superstition and beliefs; that religion was a mere leftover, an irrational residue which the future would erase.” [Régis Debray, “A Pope for All Channels.” New Left Review. Series II, number 33, May–June 2005. No pagination.]

“If one judges by the history of Cuba and certain other Latin American countries, guerrilla warfare seems to pass through the following stages : first, the stage of establishment; second, the stage of development, marked by the enemy offensive carried out with all available means (operational and tactical encirclements, airborne troops, bombardments, etc.); finally, the stage of revolutionary offensive, at once political and military. During the first stage, clearly the hardest to surmount and the most exposed to all sorts of accidents, the initial group experiences at the outset a period of absolute nomadism; later, a longer period of hardening or seasoning by the combatants, the organization of a regular mail service, of supply lines, of relief forces, of arms depots, arriving at the final phase of the true establishment or minimal constitution of a zone of operations. This progression witnesses a growth in absolute numbers of fighters but also a relative diminution since services, smallscale industry, and officer-cadres are developing: in other words, the technical side grows (armament, communications, production, explosives, training schools for recruits, etc.) in response to the development of guerrilla fire power and its offensive strength.” [Régis Debray. Revolution in the Revolution?: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle In Latin America. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. 1967. Page 32.]

“I believe there is a causal connection between the evasion of the nation— which here means nature, the link with one’s birthplace, all the same thing etymologically—and the considerable difficulties of socialist agriculture. They belong to the same realm, at any rate, things of a brutely material order, of the earth under the earth, as distinct from the order of cities, industry, technology, and so on. This is the blind spot of Marxism, the area on which light is never brought to bear.” [Régis Debray, “Marxism and the National Question.” New Left Review. Series I, number 105, September–October 1977. Pages 25-41.]

“The historical necessities of struggle have given priority to defence over knowledge: first of all, defend the socialist camp from its assailants, in order to protect the proletariat from doubt and despair, etc. Hence apology rather than analysis. Impossibility of taking a distance. For it is evident that analysis would reveal the existence of contradictions internal to socialism; contradictions which Communism—as a mass ideology—claims have disappeared.” [Régis Debray, “Schema for a study of Gramsci.” New Left Review. Series I, number 59, January–February 1970. Pages 48-52.]

“The rural centre … is in direct and unmediated contact both with the inhabitants of the zone of operations and with the material conditions of existence: by clearing a corner of the forest so as to be able to grow crops, by the collective working of the soil, by hunting, etc.” [Régis Debray, “Latin America: The Long March.” New Left Review. Series I, number 33, September–October 1965. Pages 17-58.]

“The media, that necessarily personalizes issues, sees only the Occidental ‘exterior,’ as the symbolic star gains in force, and certainly his style, his fables and his personalities, which issue, however, from an Oriental and hidden ‘interior.’” [Régis Debray, “A Guerrilla with a Difference: Régis Debray, one-time comrade of Che Guevara, goes to Chiapas to meet Sub-Commandante Marcos, who speaks for the Zapatistas.” New Left Review. Series I, number 218, July–August 1996. Pages 128-137.]

“It has been Holy Unity week. The official ceremonies organized around the tenth anniversary of May ’68 brought together everyone in this country with a name, a status or a decoration and saturated every medium of communication.” [Régis Debray, “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary.” New Left Review. Series I, number 115, May–June 1979. Pages 45-65.]

“… Chile is distinguished by … the total control of the large newspapers and all the the propaganda media by the dominating class ….” [Régis Debray, “Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America.” New Left Review. Series I, number 45, September–October 1967. Pages 13-41.]

“Mediology or mediation studies offer a systematic framework for the interdisciplinary analysis of culture and technology that aims to integrate the social sciences and overcome their limitations. Sociology studies how collectivities are formed and societies are made, but tends to neglect the role of culture and technology; semiotics studies culture, but omits the material conditions of its diffusion; media studies focus on newspapers, colour TVs and the internet, but leaves out other media of communication and transmission; while the history of technology ignores how collective subjectivities are formed and how societies are transformed by techniques and social organizations.” [Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Régis Debray and Mediation Studies, or How Does an Idea Become a Material Force?” Thesis Eleven. Volume 89, number 1, May 2007. Pages 23-42.]

“The importance of Régis Debray in relation to the Latin American revolution stems from several things. He has broken from the rigid confines of European Communism, even to the extent of rejecting the Communist Parties of Latin America as the automatic vanguard of the coming revolutions. He has taken from Che [Guevara] and Fidel [Castro] and incorporated into his own thinking the fundamental conception of the Latin American revolution as an international revolution, that is, as a continental revolution. He has proven his own courage and devotion in the great risks he has taken to make personal contact with the guerrilla movements, risks which ultimately subjected him to the criminal vengeance of the Bolivian military and the CIA [Congressional Intelligence Agency]. He has seemed to be the theoretical embodiment of the Cuban Revolution and his writings are an attempt to develop a theory of the Latin American Revolution based on the Cuban Experience.” [Martin Glaberman, “Régis Debray: Revolution Without a Revolution.” Speak Out. April, 1968. Pagination unknown.]

“Politicians, academics, the media, and job seekers focus on downsizing, offshoring, and outsourcing as the main causes of unemployment and declining opportunities, even for college graduates. They neglect, however, the impact of self-sourcing, a term I apply to the complex and relatively unnoticed effects of the radical reorganization of our working and non-working time due to the widespread use of information technologies. In this essay, I will explore the significance of self-sourcing, which I define as the intensification of the process of transferring work from the sphere of production, where it is visible and paid, to the sphere of consumption, where it is invisible and unpaid. This process is not new and it is commonly understood as self-service. It is my contention that self-sourcing signals a qualitative change in the forces and the relations of production, consumption, and circulation, which merits theoretical and empirical investigation.” [Martha E. Gimenez, “Self-Sourcing: How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay!” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 57, issue 7, December 2007. Pages 37-41.]

“It [poverty in modern nations] suggests class antagonism, social problems, and the need for change; and it often is so interpreted by the subjects of the study. Poverty becomes a dynamic factor which affects participation in the larger national culture and creates a subculture of its own. One can speak of the culture of the poor, for it has its own modalities and distinctive social and psychological consequences for its members. It seems to me that the culture of poverty cuts across regional, rural-urban, and even national boundaries. For example, I am impressed by the remarkable similarities in family structure, the nature of kinship ties, the quality of husband-wife and parent-child relations, time orientation, spending patterns, value systems, and the sense of community found in lower-class settlements in London ….” [Oscar Lewis. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. 1975. Page 2.]

“My own concept of it [human behavior] has evolved as my work has progressed and remains subject to amendment by my own further work and that of others. The scarcity of literature on the culture of poverty is a measure of the gap in communication that exists between the very poor and the middle-class personnel—social scientists, social workers, teachers, physicians, priests and others who bear the major responsibility for carrying out the antipoverty programs. Much of the behavior accepted in the culture of poverty goes counter to cherished ideals of the larger society. In writing about m ulti problem families social scientists thus often stress their instability, their lack of order, direction and organization. Yet, as I have observed them, their behavior seems clearly patterned and reasonably predictable. I am more of ten struck by the inexorable repetitiousness and the iron entrenchment of their lifeways.” [Oscar Lewis, ”The Culture of Poverty.” Scientific American. Volume 215, number 4, October 1966. Pages 19-25.]

“Once the culture of poverty has come into existence it tends to perpetuate itself. By the time slum children are six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic attitudes and values of their subculture. Thereafter, they are psychologically unready to take full advantage of changing conditions or improving opportunities that may develop in their lifetime.” [Oscar Lewis, ”The Culture of Poverty.” Ekistics. Volume 23, number 134, January 1967. Pages 3-5.]

“Conflicting views concerning the basic character of poverty are found in legislation and policy as well as academic analysis. An economically-oriented interpretation will lead to the support of one type of policy, while emphasis on poverty as a distinctive sub-culture within the broader society suggests other approaches. A complete reconciliation of these differences is unlikely, but a clarification of the differences may help do away with important ambiguities and inconsistencies in coping with poverty.” [Daniel P. Moynihan, “Report on the Seminar on Poverty.” Records of the Academy (American Academy of Arts and Sciences). Number 1966/1967, 1966–1967. Pages 29-31.]

“The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to hove the effects directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.” [Daniel P. Moynihan. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Commonly called “The Moynihan Report.” Washington, D.C.: The United States Department of Labor. March, 1965. Page 48.]

“Debates about the status and progress of black families in the United States started before the Moynihan report and have clearly raged since. The report focused on how black family structure contributed to a host of factors that all impeded progress toward social equity. In the decades since its release, many of the social trends that concerned Moynihan have worsened for blacks and nonblacks alike. Today it is clear that no one factor by itself holds the key to economic and social progress. Policymakers, community leaders, and individuals themselves must act to enhance economic opportunities and social equity for black men and families. Otherwise, we may spend the next 50 years lamenting our continued lack of progress.” [Gregory Acs with Kenneth Braswell, Elaine Sorensen, and Margery Austin Turner. The Moynihan Report Revisited. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute. June, 2013. Page 22.]

“Of the wealth metatheories [individualism, culturalism, structuralism/situationalism, and fatalism], the predictions based on culturalism best fit the data. Table 3 shows that over 40% of the culture of wealth hypotheses were empirically supported, whereas fewer than one-third of the individualism and structuralism/situationalism hypotheses and only about one-fifth of the fatalism hypotheses were supported. In line with culturalism, respondents attributed significant causal importance to personality factors such as drive and risk-taking, and to structural/situational factors such as good schools, ‘pull,’ and inheritance. Once again, the fit was imperfect and pluralism of thought prevailed.” [Kevin B. Smith and Lorene H. Stone, “Rags, Riches, and Bootstraps: Beliefs about the Causes of Wealth and Poverty.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 30, number 1, spring 1989. Pages 93-107.]

“[Oscar] Lewis’s Marxism permeated both his ethnographic work and his subculture of poverty thesis. You will not find it, though, in a glib spouting of dialectics, or in a fatuous waving of rhetorical red banners. There seems to have been nothing in Lewis’s personality that would have predisposed him to such histrionics. Instead, Lewis’s Marxism, like that of so many of his generation, could be seen in his working class sympathies, in his support for unionism, and in his championing of the causes of the downtrodden. It expressed itself above all in that uneven mix of cynicism and respect his generation adopted when dealing with the lower classes and their diverse subcultures. Lewis’s family ethnographies, in fact, resonate with the curiously eclectic politics and aesthetic realism of a Depression Era Marxism in which proletarian artists celebrated the ‘resourcefulness of the poor.’” [David L. Harvey and Michael H. Reed, “The Culture of Poverty: An Ideological Analysis.” Sociological Perspectives. Volume 39, number 4, winter 1996. Pages 465-495.]

“In the US, … there has grown in recent years a vast literature on the ways in which the government welfare system has created a ‘culture of poverty’—a system in which the state has made it a rational decision for many poor people to stay at home, bear children (including out of wedlock) and receive government support rather than take low-paying and unpleasant jobs. In reply, the question we may wish to ask is: why is a wealthy, advanced society such as the US turning out so many individuals with so few skills and such art impoverished world-view that a life on welfare is thought by them desirable? Some will respond with a weak reference to ‘human nature,’ but the only assertive answers to these questions being offered in the US are from those with genetic and racial explanations. From liberals (in the American sense) we get only embarrassed silence or denials.” [Paul Auerbach, “On Socialist Optimism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 192, March–April 1992. Pages 5-35.]

“… [Consider] ‘culture of poverty’ … thinking …. [In] neoliberal forms of culturalising poverty, … the creativity of the poor is inspiring and useful for surviving the exclusions of market economies. This perspective emphasises negotiation and negates the possibility of opposition to structures of market domination. It forgets that the poor’s ‘cultures of survival’ have themselves become frontiers of capital accumulation.” [Dia Da Costa, “Subjects of Struggle: theatre as space of political economy.” Third World Quarterly. Volume 31, number 4, June 2010. Pages 617-635.]

“Identity politics, as ideology (e.g. multiculturalism, diversity) and as practice, obscures how class location is the source of common experiences and problems, opening and closing educational, social and economic opportunities. Such commonalities transcend racial, ethnic and cultural differences and could be the base for collective mobilization and organizing in a variety of settings, such as neighborhoods, schools, communities, and workplaces. While it is the case that people with different histories, ancestries and cultures experience class-based commonalities from different perspectives, their material conditions and needs are nevertheless similar. For example, working-class racial and ethnic minorities, especially the poor strata within the working class, need job training, steady employ ment, affordable housing, health care, and so forth. Because identity politics is not based on structural conditions generating objective interests, like class, it can be an ideological weapon for all political standpoints: it can pit people with similar needs against each other, obscuring the material conditions for their potential cooperation and acquisition of political strength. And, it can be used by the dominant classes and dominant identities (e.g. white males) to claim oppression and exclusion by the very policies intended to redress the effects of inequality, via claims of ‘reverse discrimination,’ and ‘political correctness.’” [Martha E. Gimenez, “With a little class: A critique of identity politics.” Ethnicities. Volume 6, number 3, September 2006. Pages 423-439.]

“The criticism of social formations is the stuff of politics.… But there is a distinction between the study of politics and the action of politics, although politicians may well find the study of politics useful in planning their actions. Now, criticism of whole social formations, and the forms of whole societies or even groups of societies implies there are limits to the field of politics, both as a field of study and a field of action. To criticise the whole of a social formation is to suggest that political action is not sufficient in itself to bring about the changes in that formation. This is the rather strange situation that brings about critical theory in which there is an interest in, but also dissatisfaction with, the field of political action and an interest in, but dissatisfaction with, the study of social and political formations. Critical theory engages in a form of criticism of social formations that does not express itself as an agenda for political action. It arises precisely through the awareness of the failure of political action, even the most extreme and radical political action of revolution, to bring about the changes needed in social formations. But this is not a reason to abandon criticism; there is still much in the world to disgree with and dissent from. What is more, there is some point in expressing that disagreement, not merely of attacking specific perspectives or actions, but not trying to get to the roots of those perspectives or actions in the social formation.” [Tim Dant. Critical Social Theory: Culture, Society and Critique. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2003. Page 2.]

“… [Tim] Dant does not restrict the purview of ‘critical theory’ to the Frankfurt School. On the contrary, he brings the ‘Germanic’ tradition represented by [Max] Horkheimer, [Theodor] Adorno and [Herbert] Marcuse into constellation with a ‘Gallic’ one – represented by such theorists as [Henrei] Lefebvre, [Roland] Barthes, [André] Gorz, [Alain] Touraine, [Jean] Baudrillard, and even [Michel de] Certeau – proposing that what has customarily been understood as (at least) two distinct bodies of thought would be better understood as a single project. ‘[T]he disparate set of cultural critics I have referred to as “critical theorists” take up similar themes, make use of similar theoretical resources, and, above all, set themselves against the established order that assumes the trajectory of modernity is towards progress. The theorists I have discussed are all dissenters, not about details or facts but about how the modern world is organised.’” [Neil Lazarus, “Critical Social Theory: Culture, Society and Critique.” Review article. The Sociological Review. Volume 54, issue 1, February 2006. Pages 190-194.]

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

“Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

“Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

“Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

“Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

“Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,”

[United Nations General Assembly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: The United Nations. December 1948. No pagination]

“… who are today’s spiritual sponges? During the four decades since Fr. [Charles] Coughlin’s radio crusade, not only have the mass media changed radically, American class structure and the social imagination have also undergone vast transformations. The empire of televangelism has expanded to incorporate a large spectrum of the faithful. These range from a more traditionalist faction who still share many of the values, and embody much the productionist character-structure of Fr. Coughlin’s followers in the [19]30’s. On the other end of the spectrum is a segment that holds on to fundamentalist religious beliefs, but which has, in many ways absorbed much of the consumptionist worldview that predominates in late capitalist America.” [Max Cafard, “Cults of Consumption.” Mesechabe. Number 9/10, 1992. Pages 31-39.]

“TBN [Trinity Broadcasting Network], the second largest religious network, is a product of Paul and Jan Crouch, one of the most ubiquitous couples in the televangelical kingdom. TBN is family. It creates an ersatz community, an electronic spiritual community. It offers the same kind of pseudo-personal dimension that soap operas do. The soap operas allow the viewer to follow the life of a variety of characters with whom the former develops a relationship of pseudo-intimacy. The soap operas blur the already vague line between illusion and reality, especially as the viewers begin to discuss characters as if they are real, fanatically read soap opera Digest to catch up on missed episodes, etc. Televangelism provides ail this and salvation too.” [Max Cafard, “Cults of Consumption: Part II.” Mesechabe. Number 36, 1992. Pages 7-10.]

“If [Pat] Robertson seems on the surface to be a very restrained and repressed Tidewater [region of Virginia] Anglo-Saxon type, beneath it all he’s really a wild and certifiably crazy gny.In fact, his claims of supernatural powers rival those of such more obvious buffoons as Robert Tilton and Oral Roberts. For example, Robertson revealed that on a trip to China he oreached in English and the audience heard his address in Chinese. That’s right, without the little earphones! Well, it does sound pretty much the same in every language, doesn’t it. As the old [Zen] Koan asks: ‘What is the sound of one televangelist’s claptrap?’” [Max Cafard, “Cults of Consumption: Part III.” Mesechabe. Number 12, 1994. Pages 4-10.]

“Dialectic or critical theory gives expression to that which is ‘other’ than what is; to the voice, cries and longings of the innocent victims of the class exploitation, domination, and barbarism of capitalist civil society. Through negative dialectical thought and its methodology of determinate negation, the critical theory of religion gives expression in a materialistic voice to suffering humanity’s religiously expressed longing for justice, redemption, happiness, God or that which is ‘totally Other’ than what is. In the Critical Theory, this totally ‘Other’ is not conceived in a metaphysical, theological, or idealistic way, which abstracts from people’s experiences in the society and history. Rather, the religious notion of the totally ‘Other,’ which is grounded in and expressive of the desperate cries for redemption by the innocent victims of the ‘slaughter-bench’ of history and society …, is translated into a secular, materialistic theory and praxis that has the potential of being a socio-historical force of social change for the creation of a better future society.” [Michael Ott, “Reclaiming the Revolutionary Substance and Potential of Religion: The Critical Theory of Religion.” Michigan Sociological Review. Volume 19, fall 2005. Pages 155-180.]

“As the critical theory of religion, informed by [Meister] Eckhart, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, [Karl] Marx, and [Sigmund] Freud, evolves further, it is concerned with the question of whether a conversion to a humanistic religiosity without dogmas, authorities, institutions, and asceticism can come into existence. Such humanistic religiosity has been prepared for centuries through the non-theistic movements from Buddhism to Marxism and Freudianism. According to the comparative, dialectical religiology, in the present world historical transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity, people do not stand before the alternative to become victims of a culture industry and mass culture characterized by sex, car, and career, on the one hand, and the acceptance of the Abrahamic notion of God, as it appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on the other hand.” [Rudolf J. Siebert, Michael R. Ott, and Dustin J. Byrd, “The critical theory of religion: From having to being.” Critical Research on Religion. Volume 1, number 1, 2013. Pages 33-42.]

“Arguments for pedagogical positions are enlivened by political, humanistic, sociological, reflection philosophic, and artistic appeal. A good example … can be taken from the recent film, Freedom Writers (2007). As the film begins, the protagonist, Mrs. Gruwell, is confronted with her own naiveté, or innocence, concerning how to run a classroom within an urban high school. As she considers the students’ needs to understand historic events like the Holocaust, she begins to help them understand the implications of their own racist and prejudicial behaviors. In a perfect world, perhaps Mrs. Gruwell would have been better prepared for her first teaching assignment. If she had come to her first teaching assignment prepared for critical constructivist praxis, she would have been ready to present relevant challenges to her students.” [Greg S. Goodman, “Coming to a Critical Constructivism: Roots and Branches.” Counterpoints. Volume 329, 2008. Pages 13-32.]

“Critical constructivism distinguishes ideologically infused knowledge from individuals’ critical constructs. For example, dominant values, discourses, and common sense are usually unconsciously (passively) acquired by people in the socialization process, and their meanings are somehow similar and shared by the masses. For critical constructivism, this form of knowledge is socially and ideologically constructed and needs to be deconstructed by individual agents who consciously, actively, and deliberately critique.” [Ilhan Kucukaydin, “Counter-Learning Under Oppression.” Adult Education Quarterly. Volume 60, number 3, 2010. Pages 215-232.]

“Though constructivism remains the ‘in’ theory in education, what prevails among educators today is the most trivial of the many interpretations of constructivism—simply that meanings are constructed. The critical constructivism we advocate places its emphasis on reflection, imagination, social consciousness, and democratic citizenship. We believe this interpretation should be a central theoretical referent for all educational practitioners. In preservice teacher education, critical constructivism should lie at the center of discussions about the nature of learning, teaching, curriculum and schooling—as a sociopolitical process.” [Michael Bentley, Stephen C. Fleury, and Jim Garrison, “Critical Constructivism for Teaching and Learning in a Democratic Society.” Journal of Thought. Volume 42, number 3-4, fall-winter 2007. Pages 9-22.]

“… whatever the locus of analysis in critical constructivist research, there is always an interest in issues of power and the intersection of race, class, gender, and disability with the phenomenon under analysis.” [Gary L. Anderson and Isaura Barrera, “Critical Constructivist Research and Special Education Expanding Our Lens on Social Reality and Exceptionality.” Remedial and Special Education. Volume 16, number 3, May 1995. Pages 142-149.]

“Education for liberation and emancipation is a collective educational activity which has as its goal social and political transformation. If personal development takes place, it does so within that context.” [Jack Mezirow, “Transformative learning and social action: A response to Inglis.” Adult Education Quarterly. Volume 49, issue 1, fall 1998. Pages 169-175.]

“There is much about the postmodern critique that both supports and challenges the validity of Transformation Theory. I agree with [Michel] Foucault who interprets modernity and postmodernity as oppositional attitudes, present in any epoch or period, that assume a continuing critical dialectic, a discourse. As there are no fixed truths or totally definitive knowledge and circumstances change, the human condition may be best understood as a continuous effort to negotiate contested meanings. That is why transformative learning, with its emphasis on contextual understanding, critical reflection on assumptions and validating meaning through discourse, is so important.” [Jack Mezirow, “Transformation Theory – Postmodern Issues.” Presented at the Adult Education Research Conference. DeKalb, Illinois. May 21st–23rd, 1999. Pages 1-8. Retrieved on August 31st, 2016.]

“I have always made the distinction between the role of the adult educator in fostering critically reflective learning and that of fostering social action. I have suggested that all adult educators should help learners foster transformative learning by becoming critically reflective of the assumptions and frames of reference of others (objective reframing) and of themselves (subjective reframing). Not all adult educators are positioned or knowledgeable enough to foster social action. I have always held that it is entirely appropriate for adult educators who choose to do so to become engaged in social action education when they feel a sense of solidarity with those who have decided to take such a course of action.” [Jack Mezirow, “Transformation theory out of context.” Education Quarterly. Volume 48, issue 1, fall 1997. Pages 60-62.]

“First, we briefly review transformative learning theory and the various alternative perspectives that have developed since the inception of the theory, including an overview of the extrarational perspective on transformative learning. We determine that the integration of psychic structures from depth psychology, including Jungian psychology, has not been critically analyzed in relation to teaching and learning and that there may not be a common understanding of the meaning of these concepts. If we view knowledge about transformative learning as practical knowledge based on [Jürgen] Habermas’s … framework, we can use this understanding to critically analyze knowledge claims within the extrarational approach to transformative learning theory. It is possible that the current epistemological crisis accounts for this situation in that there is often no consensus about the validity and legitimacy of knowledge and there is no space to question the validity of knowledge claims. Finally, we close with questions that researchers, theorists, and scholars of transformative learning might want to consider in relation to the use of Jungian concepts and terminology within transformative learning theory.” [Ilhan Kucukaydin and Patricia Cranton, “Critically Questioning the Discourse of Transformative Learning Theory.” Adult Education Quarterly. Volume 63, number 1, 2012. Pages 43-56.]

“Since first introduced by Jack Mezirow in 1978, the concept of transformative learning has been a topic of research and theory building in the field of adult education …. Although Mezirow is considered to be the major developer of transformative learning theory, other perspectives about transformative learning—influenced by the work of Robert Boyd—are emerging. Following a discussion of transformative learning as conceptualized by Mezirow, this Digest describes research and theory building by Robert Boyd and its influence on current perspectives of transformative learning. Some suggestions for fostering transformative learning conclude the Digest.” [Susan Imel, “Transformative Learning in Adulthood.” ERIC digest number 200. Columbus, Ohio: ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult Career and Vocational Education. 1998. Pages 1-7.]

“Jack Mezirow’s work is perhaps the most well known of theories of transformative learning in the field of adult education. Although [Paulo] Freire’s influence on Mezirow is clearly evident, Mezirow’s view represents a distinct understanding of what transformation means within the actions of adult learning. Based on his work with returning adult women students in the early 1970s, Mezirow … developed a theory of adult learning grounded in cognitive and developmental psychology.” [Jack M. Dirkx, “Transformative Learning Theory in the Practice of Adult Education: An Overview.” PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning. Volume 7, 1998. Pages 1-14.]

“One of the research questions that informs this paper asks ‘Can transformative learning theory be put into practice, and if yes, what are some of the differences it makes to the lives of learners?’ A more specific question is ‘Can disorienting dilemmas be triggered by carefully designed exercises, and, if yes, what are the effects on student transformative learning?’ To do this we need first to define and critically review [Jack] Mezirow’s theory, which has, over time, become known as transformative learning theory. According to Mezirow, this theory explains how adult learners make sense or meaning of their experiences, how social and other structures influence the way they construe that experience, and how the dynamics involved in modifying meanings undergo changes when learners find them to be dysfunctional …. Mezirow’s theory owes much to the critical theorists and, in particular, to Jürgen Habermas.” [Michael Christie, Michael Carey, Ann Robertson, and Peter Grainger, “Putting transformative learning theory into practice.” Australian Journal of Adult Learning. Volume 55, number 1, April 2015. Pages 9-27.]

“A critical constructionist approach to family services is proposed as a useful framework for family social work. An outline of the foundations and basic ideas of critical constructionism are presented. These ideas are then applied to social work with families. Some practice implications are discussed.” [Stanley L. Witkin, “Family Social Work: A Critical Constructionist Perspective.” Abstract. Journal of Family Social Work. Volume 1, issue 1, 1994. Pages 33-45.]

“The critical-constructionist approach adopted in this paper is concerned with how various individuals or ‘actors’ (e.g. PWD, caregivers, physicians, etc.) in a given environment ‘are involved in the construction of the meaning of phenomena’ …, such as the provision and receipt of care by a person with dementia. Contextual features, such as the place where care occurs and organizational cultures and policies, also play a role in shaping constructions. Typically, realities are co-constructed with other people through interaction: some constructions are thus held by many individuals and even across cultures. People can construct worlds together or against each other, and what are viewed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ interactions can be seen as a function of how well different actors interpret and present phenomena through their constructions. These in turn, need to be understood in terms of who (or what) benefits from them.

“In this sense constructions are not benign and share with Critical Theory the key premise that ‘all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are socially and historically constituted’ …. While ‘constructions are not more or less “true,” in any absolute sense, but simply more or less informed and/or sophisticated’ …, Critical Theorists such as [Pierre] Bourdieu and [Michel] Foucault … have argued that individuals with the greatest ‘social capital’ tend to reproduce social realities that favor their own interests and silence the most vulnerable. Power is linked to knowledge, which may be very context-specific, deriving from majority-shared constructions of truth which inevitably dominate minority-shared versions.”

[Sharon Koehna, Lynn McCleary, Linda Garcia, Melanie Spence, Pavlina Jarvis, and Neil Drummond, “Understanding Chinese–Canadian pathways to a diagnosis of dementia through a critical-constructionist lens.” Journal of Aging Studies. Volume 26, Issue 1, January 2012. Pages 44-54.]

“What remains of the Karl Marx is a residue of fire, small but still very important. The residue in my view consists of four items:

[Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Buddha or Karl Marx. Sagamihara City, Japan: Dr. Babasabeb Ambedkar International Association for Education. September, 2015. Page 7.]

“The idea of ‘culture’ may neglect power. Critical theory generally suggests that human interaction is a power play of domination and oppression. People who dominate (the dominant group) make the rules and impose them on others, who are typically oppressed by them. The observational categories of racism, sexism and other ‘isms’ previously or yet to be defined refer to this process, both in individual and institutional terms. This critical focus on power is a robust line of theory and research in intercultural relations ….” [Milton J. Bennett, “The value of cultural diversity: rhetoric and reality—Meeting Report on Fellows Day, International Academy of Intercultural Research 9ᵗʰ Biennial Congress, Bergen, Norway.” SpringerPlus. Volume 5, number 1, December 2016. Creative Commmons. Pages 1-14.]

“After having established the existence of repressive mechanisms in the sphere of consumption, the task of anticipating institutional forms capable of yielding emancipatory practice can no longer be construed merely in terms of a democratic control of production. With the critique of the culture industry elaborated by first-generation critical theorists, one does indeed discover that the emancipation of internal nature ought to be treated as a matter regarding both the labour process and consumption. The vision of democratic control must, in this sense, treat production and consumption as two potential spheres of self-realization ….” [Charles Masquelier. Critical Theory and Libertarian Socialism: Realizing the Political Potential of Critical Social Theory. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2015. Page 137.]

“A critical theory of controversy would require the integration of the normative study of argumentation with critical studies of practices.…

“The dialectical positioning of a theory of argument against practice is in line with the aims of critical social theory ….

“The direction of a future critical theory of controversy most likely resides in those predicaments where the needs for communication are urgent and its prospects dim. Thus, argumentation is called upon as a ‘court of appeal’ to mediate with ‘good reasons’ questions crucial to strangers who must find a way to live together under tides of globalizing change.…

“… the critical practice of argument requires critique of all theories and practices that would substitute reflectively discerned convictions for those reasons that cannot withstand public scrutiny. In this respect, the tasks of a social theory of argument must always remain unfinished, for its goals traffic with ideals.”

[G. Thomas Goodnight, “Predicaments of Communication, Argument, and Power: Towards a Critical Theory of Controversy.” Informal Logic. Volume 23, number 2, 2003. Pages 119-137.]

“In order for non-Marxism to become an operational theory capable of both explaining immanently the ‘human condition’ in Capitalism and proposing ways of action that can introduce change, it is in a need of identifying another instance of the Real, the one which immanently fuels its theoretical desire. It is an instance of immanence which is structurally situated on the side, in the domain of the thinking subject (or the Stranger). It is the desire (theoretical, or Truth-Desire) of the Thinker unilaterally positioned and parallel to the cause-in-the-last-instance. Namely, an immanent cause of the Marxist theoretical project is also the Real of the Marxist desire to explain the human subjugation by Capitalism and to intervene into its Real (or Reality) in order to change it. Hence, in order to construct a theory which also ‘behaves’ immanently with respect to this second source of immanence, one is in need of a more ‘mobile’ non-Marxist approach that can provide answers to the question regarding the form/s of exploitation and subjugation, but also ground the political possibility of acting against it.” [Katerina Kolozova, “The Project of Non-Marxism: Arguing for ‘Monstrously’ Radical Concepts.” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice. 2007. Pages 1-20.]

“Unlike constructivist theories and investigations, a critical relational constructionism includes its own activities within the scope of its discourse of construction. Thus it treats the activities of theorizing and empirical work as processes of construction. In addition, and just like any other discourse, critical relational constructionism provides a position from which to reflect on the local particularities of other theories and metatheoretical standpoints.…

“… Rather than constructing a particular form of life as a stable entity with properties and possessions, a critical constructionism theorizes power as a relational process. Power is an ongoing, relational construction, able both to open up and to close down possibilities.”

[Dian Marie Hosking, “Can Constructionism Be Critical?” Handbook of Constructionist Research. James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, editors. New York: The Guilford Press imprint of Guilford Publications, Inc. 2008. Page 671.]

“One obvious implication is that a critical constructionism must be sensitive to different relational forms, to the possible dominance of vision and visual actants, and to their possible relations with self–other differentiation.” [Dian Marie Hosking, “Can Constructionism be Critical?” Handbook of Constructionist Research. James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, editors. New York: The Guilford Press imprint of Guilford Publications, Inc. 2008. Page 679.]

“… any consideration of international ideologies starting from an American base must still come to grips with the specific roles of the nation-state and nationalism in the articulation of those very dreams for transnational futures. In turn, the emphasis in American forms of internationalism on the outreach of specific cultural institutions rooted in American experience indicates how closely ‘internationalism’ has been linked to American exceptionalism through concepts of cultural expansionism.” [Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History.” The American Historical Review. Volume 96, number 4, October 1991. Pages 1031-1055.]

“… Ian Tyrrell’s ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’ … repudiates American exceptionalism ….” [Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration.” American Quarterly. Volume 45, number 1, March 1993. Pages 1-43.]

“… the only difference that difference makes for American exceptionalism is the extension and/or intensification of America’s status as imperial center – even, or especially, when the center no longer holds.” [Christian P. Haines. A Desire Called America: Biopolitics and Utopian Forms of Life in American Literature. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Minnesota. Minneapolis, Minnesota. December, 2012. Page 19.]

“The crucial strategy for the comparativist scholar is to dissociate rhetoric from ethos, the cultural sign from the freight of moral values lodged (often unconsciously) within it. This serves to make manifest the ludic, ‘textual’ qualities of the foreign landscape, and therefore (from our point of view) the constructed and radically provisional nature of the American experience. By the very fact of their location outside or on the margins of American society, Americanists from other parts of the globe may find themselves in a better position to avoid the tautologies of American exceptionalism, and so to help redesign the problematic framework of the area studies model.” [Paul Giles, “Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives.” Journal of American Studies. Volume 28, number 3, December 1994. Pages 335-358.]

“Paul Giles, a British scholar of American studies, was among the many who helped steer the agenda of the meeting toward a renewed critique of American exceptionalism as practiced by American scholars. He argued ‘it remains very difficult to dislodge many of the primary, foundational assumptions of American studies, because such assumptions are often bound unconsciously to a residual cultural transcendentalism that fails to acknowledge the national specificity of its own discourse.’ Giles suggests that American studies have a lot to gain from paying attention to, lor instance, European scholars who do not share that assumption.” [Robert Warrior, “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn.” Cultural Studies Review. Volume 15, number 2, September 2009. Pages 119-130.]

“… the theory of intragroup cooperation and inter-group conflict illuminates the complex problem of race discrimination. Status production explains both the historic and contemporary contours of race discrimination far better than the prevailing associational model of discrimination. Understanding race discrimination as a means of producing status helps us explain its tenacity in the face of market competition and reveals, within an economic model, the full costs of the practice of discrimination. The effort to gain status by taking status away from others, and the responsive measures this effort elicits, are socially wasteful in the same way that confiscation of material property is wasteful. The inefficiency in the system of status competition is measured by the investments each group makes in gaining or protecting its status. Prohibiting the more productive forms of investments can reduce the wastefulness of such actions even if it does not eliminate it.” [Richard H. McAdams, “Cooperation and Conflict: The Economics of Group Status Production and Race Discrimination.” Harvard Law Review. Volume 108, number 5, March 1995. Pages 1003-1084.]

“As overarching frameworks for interpreting social reality, institutional logics are ‘the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices’ that direct attention toward particular stimuli specify criteria for legitimacy and define what constitutes appropriate behavior …. Most institutional scholars now recognize that fields do not necessarily evolve toward stability and convergence around a dominant logic, but often constitute sites of prolonged contestation—both latent and overt …. This relative “incoherence” of institutional demands points to an enduring pattern of complexity that can be challenging contexts for organizations to navigate ….” [Mia Raynard, “Deconstructing complexity: Configurations of institutional complexity and structural hybridity.” Strategic Organization. Volume 14, number 4, November 2016. Pages 310-335.]

“the development, proliferation and influence of field-wide institutional norms, practices and principles – commonly referred to as institutional logics – has been theorized. Over the last two decades this body of literature has offered a rich and useful perspective through which the influence of norms and beliefs has been examined as underscoring institutional formation. As a field level concept, institutional logics point to the social construction, stability, historical patterns and extensive reach of belief systems and practices …. As such the concept has provided significant insights into how institutional pressures influence and guide organizational actions and provide impetus for institutional change ….” [Josef Pallas and Magnus Fredriksson, “Translating Institutional Logics: When the Media Logic Meets Professions.” Organization Studies. Volume 37, number 11, November 2016. Pages 1661-1684.]

“The Liberal notion of civil society, which pervades the international development industry, is based on a state-civil society dualism that speaks about a universalising civil society waging war against a particularistic and centralising state. At the same time, though, civil society is framed as existing ‘with’ and alongside the state and, most importantly, ultimately inside a state-civil society consensus about social order that reproduces class domination and undercuts processes of emancipation. Of the two Radical notions, the state-centric one has been dominant historically within communism. This state-centric position (which is consistent with a large body of classical Marxist and Social Democratic thinking) argues for political strategies against the state and it proclaims the possibility of emancipation in, through and by means of (and therefore ‘within’) the state. The alternative perspective involves society-centred emancipation and is in line with versions of Anarchist, Communist Libertarian and Marxist Autonomist (and other forms of anti-statist communist) thought that speaks not of acquiring state power (either through the electoral system or on an insurrectionary basis) but of developing counter-power (or even antipower) inside the bowels of civil society despite (or ‘without’) the state. These three conceptions I refer to respectively as the With (Liberal), Within (Radical state-centric) and Without (Radical society-centric) perspectives.” [Kirk Helliker, “The state of emancipation – with, within, without?” Interface: a journal for and about social movements. Volume 2, number 1, May 2010. Pages 118-143.]

“If I have been called ‘alarmist’ for warning of the crisis before it occurred, I expect to be labeled simplistic for reducing it to a crime story. Besides, most crime stories, in the bookshops or on TV, are about how the bad guys are brought to justice. Criminals fascinate people, in part, because they are not like you and me; they are usually twisted, perverted, damaged and evil. In the end, in popular mythology at least, the cops get the robbers and everyone lives happily ever after.

“That has not happened on Wall Street or in the communities with so many lives torn apart by some of the schemes discussed in these pages. The scams, frauds and falsehoods I have sought to document have devastated middle class and working class communities where the prospects to be made whole are not ones we can count on. We will live with the legacy of these crimes for a long time with many homeless, out of work, and on the edge of losing hope.…

“My own work, nurtured in the routines of high school journalism in the [19]50’s, driven by the underground press in the [19]60’s, rock radio in the [19]70’s, TV producing in the [19]80’s, and independent filmmaking and media trouble-making ever since is barely hanging on, hoping against hope that it will, against all odds, find an audience and incite concern and demands for change. I am creating media about a financial crisis that I am living! And If like it and learned from it, find the energy and sense of social responsibility to tell others and spread the word. That’s our only hope for survival.

“My cry for economic justice is just that, one more discordant voice in the wilderness, but sometime, the winds blow it into places and minds that will learn from it, resonate with it, and pass it on. I do this work in part because I don’t know what else to do, in part because of an injunction in that song by Leonard Cohen, which is now part of the soundtrack of my life, to keep ringing those bells ‘that can still ring,’ and trying to let the light in.”

[Danny Schechter. The Crime of Our Time: Was the Economic Collapse “Indeed Criminal” New York: Globalvision Inc. 2009. Pages 209-210.]

“… the newly developed perspectives inside the global field of resistance convey a new mode of social thought, coined here the accommodative cognition. In this article, in order to overcome the difficulties of examining the whole diverse global field of resistance for its newly evolved ideological elements, I start by constructing an ideal-type of the so-called anti-globalization movement. The ideal-typical description of the movement is constructed by accentuating those notions of the movement which cannot be easily understood based on dominant theoretical frames. I call this ideal-construction the alter-globalization movement, which can be used as an analytical tool to examine different participant groups, organizations, individuals, and intellectuals within the global field of resistance for the novelty of their styles of thought.” [S. A. Hamed Hosseini, “Beyond practical dilemmas and conceptual reductions: the emergence of an ‘accommodative consciousness’ in the alternative globalization movement.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies. Volume 3, number 1, January 2006. Pages 1-27.]

“… [A] degree of magic is involved in the practice of making invisible things visible, though. In order to authorize a specific method of making things visible, one has to prove that those things have not existed before. Here is where the myth of chronological superiority comes in—one has to have proof of having done something before anyone else has done it. But this is already another subject. Let us stick to visibility as a metaphor. Is there a sensitive way to combine the modes of being visible and invisible things at the same time? A way of working without falling into a posture of shaman and not betraying the discretion of an individual process either? Or another level, it also involves a reluctance to display signs of visibility as proof of something that one has done because maybe that something is purely mental or is not intended to be exposed. ‘Visible’ is too often meant to speak to foundations or magazines and thus to gain further visibility. ‘Invisible’ cultivates the aura of esoterics and enchantment. Being more visible as an artist helps to promote an invisible work of art, while being visible as artwork work of art allows the figure of an artist to remain farther in the shadow. ‘Don’t close your eyes completely, yet don’t open them fully too,’ adds a sentence from the manual of some meditation practice.” [Raimundas Malašauskas, “A Few Notes on Being Invisible and Visible at the Same Time.” Visible: Where Art Leaves Its Own Field and Becomes Visible as Part of Something Else. New York: Sternberg Press. 2010. Pages 28-31.]

“Capitalism is not a monster that can be slain by a single strategic sword. Rather we face a complex and constantly mobile organism, half machine with its automatic drives towards accumulation, half animal with the reflexes to get around barriers, cannibalise other capacities and reproduce itself by feeding rapaciously off its environment. We need to recognise we are up against a hydra-headed system that cannot be destroyed at any one point but can only be surpassed through multiple points of transformation based on an ecology that has at its centre the drive for human wellbeing.…

“… No hierarchy was sacred as every claim to authority or domination came under scrutiny. New conceptions of knowledge emerged through the movements‘ need to understand and act on structures that were not publicly acknowledged or immediately visible. The break from deference, the pervasive challenge to authority and assertion of cultural equality, fuelled a rebellious, self-confident spirit associated with a qualitative growth in capacities – a result of the rapid expansion of education and heightened expectations arising from the postwar boom and social democracy. Central to the character of these rebellions was the way the struggles of previously subordinate groups, colonised peoples, women, gays, blacks and others, challenged and began to transform dominant mentalities, including those of the traditional left.”

[Hilary Wainwright, “State of Counter Power – How understanding neoliberalism’s cultural underpinnings can equip movements to overthrow it.” State of Power 2014: Exposing the Davos Class. Nick Buxton, editor. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Transnational Institute. 2014. Pages 81-94.]

“… research exploring moral distress has expanded to the multidisciplinary team (MDT). Evidence shows that all healthcare professionals providing both direct and nondirect care can experience moral distress …. However, there is also some evidence suggesting nurses may experience some of the highest levels of moral distress amongst the MDT.… It has also been suggested that nurses’ position in the hierarchy, responsible for carrying out the requests of others yet lacking the authority to make ultimate decisions, could affect perceived levels of moral distress.” [Georgina Morley, “Perspective: The Moral Distress Debate.” Journal of Research in Nursing. Volume 21, number 7, November 2016. Pages 570-575.]

“… my aim in this article is to analyze what I call ‘global depeasantization,’ a concept abstracted from the social history of our time. It expresses experience of the Third World peasantries between 1945 and 1990, when an increasing number of people who were involved in agriculture with direct access to the production their means of subsistence became rapidly and massively concentrated in urban locations. 1950, only 29 percent of the total world population, and 16 percent of the Third World population lived in urban areas. By the year 2000 nearly half of the world population and percent of the Third world population will live in urban areas. In Latin America and Middle East approximately 70 percent of the population is already urbanized ….” [Farshad A. Araghi, “Global Depeasantization, 1945-1990.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 36, number 2 spring 1995. Pages 337-368.]

“… ‘depeasantization,’ as Farshad Araghi has argued, is a policy that has been an unspoken part of the postwar agricultural policy landscape, indeed a tacit prerequisite for modern industrial capitalism, but it has been made explicit in the latest generation of agricultural development policy. In its 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture, the World Bank makes it baldly clear that small farmers are ‘inefficient’ and, therefore, impediments to agricultural productivity, growth and ‘a pro-poor agenda.’” [Raj Patel, “The hungry of the earth.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 151, September/October 2008. Pages 2-7.]

“Capital is … sociological study of the world of alienated labor. At the same time, [Karl] Marx explores in detail what he considers the fundamental aspects of the expanding capitalist system: its developing productive forces and its basic relations of production. In these terms, Capital is a careful examination of the changing existential conditions of men and, concomitantly, of their changing character and consciousness; it is a documentation of his thesis that in the process of material production men alter, along with the conditions of their existence, their entire psychological makeup.

“The first phase in the development of the productive forces within the capitalist mode of production Marx called ‘simple cooperation.’ While cooperation is characteristic of all large-scale production, simple cooperation prevails during that period in which capital operates on a large scale, but division of labor and machinery play a subordinate part.”

[Irving M. Zeitlin. Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1968. Page 103.]

“How are we to picture this sceptical concern: the concern about ‘the reality of discourse’? If, in one way or another, we think of language as a tool, it may be very unclear what this could come to. There is little, if any, room for that concern in cases in which the words function, more or less, as simply tools in a practical venture. There are contexts in which we might say: so long as the results are achieved – for example, I get my cup of coffee – there is no further question about whether there has been successful communication between the waitress and myself. But much discussion is not like that. When in conversation with another, one may, in particular cases, wonder whether one is really in contact with them at all: whether the words that are passing back and forth really amount to a genuine discussion, or whether it is all just words. I sense, perhaps, that while the moves that each of us makes in the conversation seem fine on the surface, nothing is really going on; or I worry that your understanding of what I am saying (and mine of what you are saying) may be quite different from what the other takes it to be.” [David Cockburn, “The Reality of Discourse.” Sense and Reality: Essays out of Swansea. John Edelman, editor. Frankfurt, Germany: Ontos Verlag. 2009. Pages 1-22.]

“Many philosophers sharply distinguish the particular judgements we make from the standards we employ in making them. This is useful in resisting an empiricist modelling of all clarity of thought on good eyesight. But from the fact that peering more closely is not going to resolve our differences, we are not to infer that nothing could possibly do so. And saying that we are operating with different standards of judgement is likely only to obscure the possibilities. (Suppose you want to convince me that bluebells really are blue. [David] Cockburn suggests that you will talk about bluebells and their likenesses to unambiguously blue things, not about ‘standards for applying the predicate blue.’)” [William H. Brenner, “Sense and Reality: Essays out of Swansea.” Review article. Philosophical Investigations. Volume 34, number 3, July 2011. Pages 317-323.]

“[David] Cockburn stresses that, for [Rush] Rhees, what makes language distinctive is that in it there is the possibility of growth in understanding. Language must be variously distinguished from ‘a game,’ ‘an organisation where each member plays its role’ and a ‘wallpaper pattern.’” [Michael Campbell, “Sense and Reality: Essays out of Swansea.” Review article. Privately published. 2010. Pages 1-4.]

“By a processual approach, I mean an approach that presumes that everything in the social world is continuously in the process of making, remaking, and unmaking itself (and other things), instant by instant. The social world does not consist of atomic units whose interactions obey various rules, as in the thought of the economists. Nor does it consist of grand social entities that shape and determine the little lives of individuals, as in the sociology of [David ‘ Émile’] Durkheim and his followers. Nor does it consist of conflict between given units, as in the work of [Karl] Marx and his many imitators. Nor yet of symbolic structures that determine and shape our perception of the social world, as in the tradition following from [Clifford] Geertz and [David M.] Schneider. These are all distinguished traditions, and each has its successes in the analysis of human affairs. But the approach here is different.

“A processual approach begins by theorizing the making and unmaking of all these things—individuals, social entities, cultural structures, patterns of conflict—instant by instant as the social process unfolds in time. The world of the processual approach is a world of events. Individuals and social entities are not the elements of social life, but are patterns and regularities defined on lineages of successive events. They are moments in a lineage, moments that will themselves shape the next iteration of events even as they recede into the past. The processual approach, in short, is fundamentally, essentially historical. All the micro-elements with which the other approaches begin are themselves macrostructures in the processual approach. Their stability is something to be explained, not presumed.

“The immediate ancestry of processualism lies in pragmatism and the Chicago School of sociology that grew up in dialogue with it. Unfortunately, no one in the Chicago School ever bothered to write systematic social theory. And the pragmatists themselves devoted more attention to psychology than to social theory. Moreover, the pragmatist encounter with rigorous processualism was truncated by George Herbert Mead’s death when he had only begun to elaborate his reactions to [Alfred North] Whitehead.”

[Andrew Abbott. Processual Sociology. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 2016. Pages ix-x.]

“… [I was driven] toward an intensely processual view of social structure. But if one took such a processual view—as did, for example, George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer—the problem of entities became acute. Was a social entity a merely accidental stability in a process, a kind of standing wave? Were boundaries in fact literally ever-changing and, hence, not in any real sense boundaries at all?

“Now it is easier to explain stasis as an emergent phenomenon in a fundamentally changing universe than vice versa. Social theories that presume given, fixed entities—rational choice being the obvious current example—always fall apart over the problem of explaining change in those entities, a problem rational choice handles by ultimately falling back on biological individuals, whom it presumes to have a static, given character. But it is very nearly as difficult to account, in a processual ontology, for the plain fact that much of the social world stays the same much of the time. Here, too, is the problem of entities and boundaries.”

[Andrew Abbott, “Things Of Boundairies.” Social Research. Volume 62, number 4, winter 1995. Pages 857-882.]

“… the crisis in academic sociology is not the same as the (very real) societal crisis. Rather, the sociological crisis is largely internal to the discipline itself – a fragmented body of scholars who seem to have lost their roots, their historical consciousness, their relevance to non-academic audiences and, most markedly, their capacity to write in plain English. This is why Andrew Abbott’s initial consolidation of his general theory, Processual Sociology, long in development, is such a welcome intervention. Reading the book is like opening the windows in an old, abandoned house, letting the wind sweep away the dust and cobwebs to reveal perfectly useable furnishings and foundation. Without hyperbole, the book should be required reading for every working sociologist, not least because processual sociology takes for granted, and is perfectly compatible with the ontological, structurational and liquid turns mentioned above. Indeed, process is the norm. As Abbott says: ‘all is change.’ Individuals, cultures, patterns of conflict, institutions are constantly making and unmaking themselves minute by minute. It is stability and durability which needs to be explained.” [Eric Lybeck, “Processual Sociology.” The Sociological Review. Volume 65, number 2, 2017. Pages 423-436.]

“A processual social ontology can … be assumed at the macro level when institutions are conceived of as existing in a network of internal relations, and as being involved in a process that transform them as well as this network of relations. [Karl] Marx’s theory of capitalism as ‘an organism capable of change and constantly engaged in a process of change’ … provides an illustration of this type of approach to the social. Here, capitalism is not only defined as a social structure, or as a set of macro level ‘social relations of production’ that shape the whole social world. It is also defined by ‘tendencies’ rooted in the functional relations between institutions.” [Emmanuel Renault, “Critical Theory and Processual Social Ontology.” Journal of Social Ontology. Volume 2, number 1, 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 17-32.]

“In what follows, I proceed in three steps. In a first step, I describe various aspects of the contemporary issue of social suffering in order to draw consequences for critical theory as social philosophy and as epistemology. In a second step, I distinguish various programmes in social philosophy: strong ones, weak ones, and mixed ones. In a third step, I try to determine which of them is the more appropriate for a critical theory of social suffering. Indirectly, this critical survey of contemporary debates about social suffering and social philosophy gives me the opportunity to present the main lines of my own contribution to a critical theory of social suffering. More generally, it gives me the opportunity to advocate a renewal of interdisciplinary approaches, as well as social theoretical and epistemological discussions in critical theory.” [Emmanuel Renault, “A Critical Theory of Social Suffering.” Critical Horizons. Volume 11, issue 2, 2010. Pages 221-241.]

“The saving of the phenomena of intellection and sensation is the primary duty of epistemology; if, however, it should appear that these phenomena can be saved in their own right only by setting up the same hypothesis as was found to be essential for ethics, the coincidence of results would by the principle of scientific economy enunciated in Plato’s phrasing of the astronomical problem lend added validity to the hypothesis in each sphere.…

“… The problem which Plato set others in astronomy he set himself in philosophy; the resulting theory of Ideas indicates by its economy that it proceeded from the same skill of formulation which charted for all time the course of astronomical hypothesis.”

[Harold Cherniss, “The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas.” The American Journal of Philology. Volume 57, number 4, 1936. Pages 445-456.]

“I remember sitting in Richard Haggart’s room discussing what we should call ourselves. ‘Institute,’ he suggested. Well, that sounded suitably grand and austere. But to be honest, the two of us, who constituted at that time the entire faculty and indeed, the students of the enterprise, could not find it in our hearts to take ourselves that seriously. Well, what about ‘Center’? Yes, that had a more informal, rallying-point feel to it, and we settled for that. ‘Cultural Studies’ came much more naturally. It was about as broad as we could make it; thereby we ensured that no department in either the humanities or social sciences who thought that they had already taken care of culture could fail to feel affronted by our presence. In this latter enterprise, at least, we succeeded.” [Stuart Hall, “Race, culture, and communications: looking backward and forward at cultural studies.” What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader. John Storey, editor. London and New York: Arnold imprint of the Hodder Headline Group. 1996. Pages 336-243.]

“There never was a prior moment when cultural studies and marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning (to use this way of speaking for a moment) there was always—already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of marxism—the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic.” [Stuart Hall, “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 261-274.]

“For me, cultural studies really begins with the debate about the nature of social and cultural change in postwar Britain. An attempt to address the manifest break-up of traditional culture, especially traditional class cultures, it set about registering the impact of the new forms of affluence and consumer society on the very hierarchical and pyramidal structure of British society. Trying to come to terms with the fluidity and the undermining impact of the mass media and of an emerging mass society on this old European class society, it registered the cultural impact of the long-delayed entry of the United Kingdom into the modern world.” [Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities.” October. Volume 53, summer 1990. Pages 11-23.]

“… some of the more striking instances of working-class political solidarity seem to have occurred not only in the larger and unmistakeably working-class industries but also to have gained from a sense of continuing local—using this now to mean quite a large area—traditions, loyalties, consciousness. A minority from these groups were able to work within these groups, making active connections between the local solidarity and political solidarity.

“Today people are moving around more; many of the old areas are being split up; new industries and new forms of industry are recruiting people from all over, offering good wages and a much more fluid range of opportunities. What we want to know is what replaces the old channels by which political consciousness expressed itself—the local, the homogeneous, the solidly ‘working-class’ feeling, the minority within. Or does much of the old feeling carry over?”

[Richard Hoggart in Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, “Working Class Attitudes.” New Left Review. Series I, number 1, January–February 1960. Pages 26-30.]

“Cultural Studies uses many theories but is not a discipline; it is a field or area of study and can draw fruitfully from several disciplines: the social sciences, history, psychology, anthropology, literary study and others. Each discipline can make its case for pre-eminence; the case made here is for literary study as a way into Cultural Studies. One thing is sure: the student should have an initial discipline outside Cultural Studies, and academic and intellectual training, and a severe one. Without that, all may be a jackdaw’s hopping from one fascinating item to another, a bringing together of glittering, unordered and unassessed heaps; a ragbag of butterfly interests, of opinions shallowly rooted; the relativist outlook, applied directly to the study of the relativist society.” [Richard Hoggart. The Way We Live Now. London: Chatto & Windus imprint of Random House UK Limited. 1995. Page 173.]

“Cultural studies in its narrower sense has developed mainly within the anglophone academy, while the profile of ‘the cultural sciences’ in other national and regional intellectual formations has often been very different. England, for example, is almost unique in the virtual absence of folklore studies or ‘ethnology’ within its academy. There is, therefore, a real danger not only of a disciplinary closure around cultural studies but also a spatial/national one that would lead to a failure to grasp the globalization as well as the transdisciplinarity of the study of culture today. When, for example, we interrogated our own relationships to Britishness, we were struck by the diversity among us: we had very different stories to tell of national, regional and transnational histories and personal identifications. One of the struggles in writing this book has therefore been to try to bring our intellectual points of reference into line with the diversity of our lives and the lives of our friends, families, children and wider kin, and our networks and places of significance. We do not claim complete success in this: the dialogues that we need to have may sometimes have to follow this book rather than fully inform it.” [Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram, and Estella Tincknell. The Practice of Cultural Studies. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2004. Page 4.]

“Here is a point where the interweaving of High Culture, High Art and the life of the General Culture in any age are sharply revealed. That literature offers us a continuing, a deeply intelligent and imaginative, illustration, recreation and valuing of the terms of our ordinary lives. Nothing can in these senses replace it; it can be an embodied revelation, liberation.” [Richard Hoggart, “High Arts and General Culture.” Society. Volume 42, number 1, November 2004. Pages 79-81.]

“The bedrock of all good museums is their commitment to scholarship in depth. In asking ‘are museums political?’, I shall look more widely than to museums alone. Indeed, I might well have used the title ‘Is Culture political?’ For the interest in ‘Culture’ in virtually all countries, developed, developing, or still underdeveloped, and with all sorts of mixed meanings, is one of the major socio-linguistic concerns across the world today.” [Richard Hoggart, “Are Museums Political.” Society. Volume 41, issue 5, July/August 2004. Pages 65-71.]

“The questions ‘uneducated’ adults can ask about politics or economics can have a special edge. I like, incidentally, to think that the process of redefinition continued until at least the [nineteen] ’forties and [nineteen] ’fifties, since the subject usually called ‘contemporary cultural studies’ (it is a field rather than a subject), which is now being offered in a number of universities and polytechnics, substantially came out of WEA [Workers’ Educational Association] and Extension Tutorial Classes, many of which had started as ‘straight’ literature classes.” [Richard Hoggart, “The Importance of Literacy.” The Journal of Basic Writing. Volume 3, number 1, fall/winter 1980. Pages 74-87.]

“In general the picture of contemporary cultural conditions that has been assumed by most British teachers of literature who have worked in this field, although it has considerable strengths, is too limited. It is insufficiently responsive to the complications of contemporary cultural conditions and so to the meanings of much contemporary art at all levels. Popular and mass art is more varied than it recognizes (and what professes to be ‘high art’ sometimes no more than a profession), and the continuity and change within working-class attitudes more complex than it allows for.” [Richard Hoggart, “Literature and Society.” The American Scholar. Volume 35, number 2, spring 1966. Pages 277-289.]

“Theoretically, it [shopping] comes in many packages (and predictably we can shop around for our favourite theoretical version or brand-name). The tradition of Western Marxism called it ‘commodification,̱ and in that form the analysis goes back at least as far as [Karl] Marx himself, in the famous opening chapter of Capital on commodity fetishism. The nineteenth-century religious perspective is Marx’s way of foregrounding a specifically superstructural dimension in the market exchanges of capitalism. He understood ‘the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ of the commodity as the way in which the labour relationship is concealed from the buyer (the ‘shopper’?) and he thereby grasped commodification as an essentially ideological operation, a form of false consciousness which has the specific function of masking the production of value from the (bourgeois) consumer.” [Fredric Jameson, “Future City.” New Left Review. Series II, number 21, May–June 2003. Pages 65-79.]

“The Socialist movement definitively split into Social Democratic parliamentary reformism and the new Stalinist orthodoxy, while Western Marxism, which abstained from openly endorsing any of these two poles, abandoned the stance of direct political engagement and turned into a part of the established academic machine whose tradition runs from the early Frankfurt School up to today’s Cultural Studies.” [Slavoj Žižek, “From History and Class Consciousness to the Dialectic of Enlightenment… and Back.” New German Critique. Number 81, autumn 2000. Pages 107-123.]

“The salient point here is not that I wasn’t listened to, but that what was ‘heard’ had been converted from cultural critique to simple advocacy for the ‘rights’ of the Other. Constructed as advocacy for the ‘rights’ of the Other, my remarks no longer impinged on the philosophical methods or identities of the men in my group. They could continue to exalt (and teach) the ‘Man of Reason’ as the disembodied Subject of philosophical history, while presumably letting the women and minorities that they would hire take care of ‘gender and race.’ Thus, the insights of feminist philosophy are kept ‘in their place,’ where they make no claim on ‘philosophy proper.’ The voices of ‘difference’ are permitted to speak, and business continues to go on as usual.” [Susan Bordo, “The Feminist as Other.” Metaphilosophy. Volume 27, number 1/2, January/April 1996. Pages 10-27.]

“It is the context, not the formal ‘grammar,’ that is determinative. (I do not believe that there is one grammar of exclusion or one grammar that necessarily ‘enables.’ Sometimes complexity enables; sometimes it effaces and mystifies.) We need to ask out of what practices particular generalizations are forged. We need to look at what they take into account and what they leave out of account. At who gets to contribute and who gets ignored. Whether they are results and recognitions of cultural dialogue or proclamations from a monocultural point of view. Whether they recognize their own (inevitable) limits. Whether they lead to a more inclusive conversation or put a stop to dialogue. In assessing the ‘enabling’ capabilities of any of our analyses and theories, grammatical/logical ‘tests’ are simply too abstract, too formal, too ahistorical.” [Susan Bordo, “‘Maleness’ Revisited.” Hypatia. Volume 7, number 3, summer 1992. Pages 197-207.]

“Cultural studies is now a movement or a network. It has its own degrees in several colleges and universities and its own journals and meetings. It exercises a large influence on academic disciplines, especially on English studies, sociology, media and communication studies, linguistics and history.…

“A codification of methods or knowledges (instituting them, for example, in formal curricula or in courses on ‘methodology’) runs against some main features of cultural studies as a tradition: its openness and theoretical versatility, its reflexive even self-conscious mood, and, especially, the importance of critique. I mean critique in the fullest sense: not criticism merely, nor even polemic, but procedures by which other traditions are approached both for what they may yield and for what they inhibit. Critique involves stealing away the more useful elements and rejecting the rest. From this point of view cultural studies is a process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge; codify it and you might halt its reactions.”

[Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text. Number 16, winter 1986–1987. Pages 38-80.]

“This essay focuses on the writing and publication practices that developed in and around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the time of its founding in 1964 until the cessation of the journal Working Papers in Cultural Studies, arguably its chief publication, in the late 1970s. Through our engagement with these practices, we want to develop an approach to the question ‘what is cultural studies?’ that is historical, speculative, and above all, materialist. It is historical insofar as it revisits the ‘moment’ of Birmingham, albeit from the perspective of its serial publications. It is speculative to the extent that we hope to build upon these historical traces and make some arguments for the ways in which textual production in cultural studies might be reformulated to allow for more productive engagements with the contemporary conjuncture. Finally, our approach is materialist because we want to de-emphasise the conceptual and biographical aspects of the work that took place at the Centre – the content, as it were – and to draw attention instead to the varied functions of that work vis-à-vis its form.” [Ted Striphas and Mark Hayward, “Working Papers in Cultural Studies, or, the Virtues of Grey Literature.” New Formations. Volume 78, 2013. Pages 102-116.]

“The methodology of cultural studies provides an … uneasy marker, for cultural studies in fact has no distinct methodology, no unique statistical, ethnomethodological, or textual analysis to call its own. Its methodology, ambiguous from the beginning, could best be seen as a bricolage. Its choice of practice, that is, is pragmatic, strategic, and self-reflective…. It is problematic for cultural studies simply to adopt, uncritically, any of the formalized disciplinary practices of the academy, for those practices, as much as the distinctions they inscribe, carry with them a heritage of disciplinary investments and exclusions and a history of social effects that cultural studies would often be inclined to repudiate.” [Cary Nelson, Paul A. Threichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Studies. Cary Nelson, Paul A. Threichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1991. Page 3.]

“There is no substitute for empirical research. Therefore, concepts need to be sufficiently general and open-ended to allow one to investigate them empirically. This may be especially true of complex, unbounded, and internally heterogeneous phenomena such as cultures. Furthermore, if cultural theorists hope to intervene in culture wars then it would be useful if there was a similarity in scope between the terms used and those employed in the wider world that need to be clarified or challenged.” [James S. Duncan and Nancy G. Duncan, “Culture unbound.” Environment and Planning A. Volume 36, 2004. Pages 391-403.]

“The point of cultural studies is particularly pragmatic. It is a means of generating knowledge about the structures we live in, and the knowledge it generates is meant to be used. As we have seen over the account I have presented, British cultural studies started out developing methodologies for the textual analysis of representations – what may look like a clearly academic interest. This, however, was just one step along a road which has lead to many destinations and applications; for example, it has lead to important interventions into the formation of cultural policy on urban design, media regulation, the arts industries or multiculturalism. As part of this journey British cultural studies has developed a distinctive mode of research, a mode which allows it to meet its objectives of analysing the articulation between cultural processes and structures in specific historical conjunctures. In this conclusion I want to deal briefly, then, with how we ‘do’ cultural studies: how do we go about research within this tradition.” [Graeme Turner. British Cultural Studies: An introduction. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 225.]

“Cultural studies has for sometime been a constituent part of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences with writers arguing that language is the central means and medium by which we understand the world and construct culture. Indeed, the contemporary emphasis given to language within cultural studies is itself a part of a wider ‘cultural turn’ that is constituted in two ways. First, culture is explored through its own specific mechanisms and logic without reduction to any other phenomenon (e.g. the mode of production). Second, facets of a social formation that had previously been considered to be quite separate from culture can themselves be understood as cultural. For example, ‘economic forces’ are cultural because they involve a set of meaningful practices, including the social relations of production and consumption, along with questions of design and marketing. Thus, to put meaning at the heart of human activity is also to place the examination of culture at the top of the agenda of the humanities and social sciences.” [Chris Barker and Dariusz Galasiński. Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis: A Dialogue on Language and Identity. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2001. Page 1.]

“Today in the USA cultural studies is typically associated with ‘minority’ scholars, that is, with multiculturalism and the analysis of race and power. (Here, of course, ‘minority’ has a completely different referent than it did for F. R. Leavis, for whom ‘minority culture’ meant the beleaguered literary culture of those charged with resisting mass communication; and something else again for the French theorist Gilles Deleuze, for whom it meant something more like simply ‘marginal.’) …

“In the USA cultural studies is less obsessed with America itself than British cultural studies is obsessed with Britain, perhaps because the USA is a global power and attracts more staff and students internationally.”

[Simon During. Cultural studies: a critical introduction. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 24-25.]

“Conceptual (and theoretical) de-linking is, in the argument I am advancing the necessary direction of liberation and decolonization, while transformation within the colonial matrix of power is the splendor and limitations of any project of emancipation(s). De-linking is not a problem for ‘emancipating’ projects because they are all presented as transformation within the linear trajectory of Western history and Western thoughts (once again, from Greek and Latin categories of thought, to German’s, English’s and French’s).” [Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking.” Cultural Studies. Volume 21, numbers 2-3, May/March 2007. Pages 449-514.]

“In this piece I will reflect upon the usefulness of cultural studies to studies of race and the law, and then make several methodological arguments about how to approach such work. The parallels between the movements, cultural studies, Critical Race Theory and LatCrit [Latina and Latino critical legal theory], are suggestive of their appropriateness for interdisciplinary sharing. All emerged as scholarly movements out of political movement. These scholarly movements encourage scholars to reflect upon the significance of their work with respect to the material conditions of people’s lives. These movements are penetrating, concerned with critiquing the ideological underpinnings of injustice and marginalization, and interpreting the relationship between belief and how people live.” [Imani Perry, “Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory and Some Reflections on Methods.” Villanova Law Review. Volume 50, issue 4, article 14, 2005. Pages 915-924.]

“Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which it is produced and consumed and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies shows how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance …. Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, although they occasionally articulate more radical or oppositional positions and are often ideologically ambiguous, combining various political positions.” [Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture.” Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, editors. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2011. Pages 7-18.]

“Cultural studies came to center attention on how subcultural groups resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Individuals who conform to hegemonic dress and fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream groups, as members of particular social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans). Individuals who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or hip hop subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.…

“There is, however, a tendency in cultural studies to celebrate resistance per se without distinguishing between types and forms of resistance (a similar problem resides with indiscriminate celebration of audience pleasure in certain reception studies). Thus resistance to social authority by the homeless evidenced in their viewing of Die Hard could serve to strengthen brutal masculist behavior and encourage manifestations of physical violence to solve social problems.”

[Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Studies and Social Theory: A Critical Intervention.” Handbook of Social Theory. George Ritzer and Barry Smart, editors. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2003. Pages 395-409.]

“Any schematic overview [of cultural studies] like this necessarily oversimplifies. Having to paint with a broad brush risks missing nuanced differences. But not to generalize sufficiently would mire this account of cultural studies in the very particularism that causes it to become sheer technical method, devoid of theoretical and political connections. This is a major issue when we consider the gathering momentum of poststructural and postmodern approaches to cultural studies as they are positioning themselves as significant alternatives to the positivist cultural studies dominating the field in American and British popular-culture analysis. In a sense, then, I am arguing that cultural studies should return to its more political roots in the work of the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham group and some feminist cultural critics, especially those who do not drink deeply of a fatefully depoliticizing poststructuralism.” [Ben Agger. Cultural Studies As Critical Theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Page 229.]

“The roots of cultural studies are … deeply embedded in the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whether based in pre-Nazi Germany or, thereafter, in Columbia University, New York.” [Peter Wade, “Introduction.” Cultural Studies will be the Death of Anthropology: Mark Hobart and Paul Willis vs Nigel Rapport and John Gledhill. Peter Wade, editor. Manchester, England: Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Manchester. 1997. Pages 1-10.]

“Strictly, cultural studies cannot be the death of anthropology as we know it because it is already dead. Now, if you must have a hand into which to thrust the smoking gun, cultural studies is the prime suspect. Put simply, anthropology has run out of episteme. But it had its day. Anthropologists did an important job in persuading Europeans that premodern peoples were not primitive or pre-rational, but were as human and culturally complex as they. Ethnocentrism however is still with us and, despite itself, the way anthropology is constituted as a form of knowledge implicates it too.” [Mark Hobart, “For the motion (1).” Cultural Studies will be the Death of Anthropology: Mark Hobart and Paul Willis vs Nigel Rapport and John Gledhill. Peter Wade, editor. Manchester, England: Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Manchester. 1997. Pages 11-19.]

“… [The] abandonment of criticizing capitalism has been accompanied by an apparent disinterest in understanding and working with organized radical movements, the only possible manner to exact social change. Many in cultural studies make no pretense of being concerned with social change, except perhaps as a hypothetical exercise. Some cultural studies people want to maintain an oppositional air about them, yet with such a shoddy intellectual foundation they often trivialize politics beyond recognition.” [Robert W. McChesney, “Is there any hope for cultural studies?” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 47, issue 10, March 1996. Pages 1-18.]

“I want to leave open the question of whether … [a] method of narration opens up possibilities for those students and academics experiencing the tensions associated with dilemmas of boycott and dialogue. This is what is at stake in naming a ‘formative’ rather than ‘performative’ sociology, as a precarious practice whose ‘success’ is not guaranteed by convention but rather resides in the ongoing relationship between the sociologist and those they address …. [I]n contrast to those forms of theoretical prose which reduce and caricature the people ‘studied’, a more poetic ethnography can liberate participants’ own sense of what is socially possible and desirable. My ethnographic writing … has sought to evoke the ethico-political possibility that they momentarily opened up. In this way, I hope that my formative sociological practice can help to extend and mobilize this imaginary for a wider public.” [Ruth Sheldon, “Formative sociology and ethico-political imaginaries: opening up transnational responses to Palestine–Israel.” The Sociological Review. Volume 64, number 4, January 2017. Pages 837-854.]

“… we combined the history of mathematics, quantitative policy analysis, and qualitative research in education to look at what we have come to call cultural studies of numeracy. Inspired by feminist work in the ‘new materialisms’ …, we asked what this body of work might mean for social inquiry, especially its quantitative variants.…

“… [There has been] a necessary turn for (post)critical inquiry given the digital lives we lead and the growth of ‘big data’ and technocratic governmentality. What we offer is our small contribution to the hope that numeracy will never be the same.”

[Patti Lather, “Post-Face: Cultural Studies of Numeracy.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 16, number 5, October 2016. Pages 502-505.]

“There is no doubt that cultural studies has attempted to further emancipatory social aims—socialist, feminist, antiracist, anti-imperialist. Its intervention has been in those substantial, specified senses political. But it is romantic to go on thinking of cultural studies as an ‘intervention.’ It is now an instituted academic activity, and academic activity, whatever its intrinsic merits, is inevitably not the same thing as a political project. What happens when an oppositional tendency becomes a budget-holding discipline, offering credentials, careers, and research funds? More or less what any realistic observer would expect. No academic discipline may honorably or realistically apply political tests to its students and teachers.” [Francis Mulhern, “The politics of cultural studies.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Volume 47, issue 3, July/August 1995. Pages 31-39.]

“Such interpretive programs that focus upon the emerging, sometimes contested, significance of scientific research exemplify what I mean by ‘cultural studies of science.’ Cultural studies of science thus do not reduce science to culture, as if these were discrete and separable in the first place, nor do they programmatically challenge the cultural authority accrued by the natural sciences. Cultural studies instead focus critically upon how and why science matters, to whom, and how people’s possibilities for meaningful action and understanding are reconfigured in part through the development of scientific practices. This emphasis upon reshaping people’s situation … is characteristic of cultural studies. Accounting for the intertwining of knowledge and power is thus central to cultural studies, both because scientific practices significantly transform what people can do and how they can understand themselves, and because scientific practices are responsive to conflicts and resonances within larger patterns of cultural practice.… Neither power nor knowledge is a thing agents or knowers possess or exercise. Power and knowledge are instead dynamic structural features of agents’ and knowers’ situations: action and inquiry are conditioned by a field of power relations and prior knowledge, which they also partially transform.” [Joseph Rouse, “Engaging Science through Cultural Studies.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Volume 2, 1994. Pages 396-401.]

“… a number of leftist critics expressed concern that the only result of the cultural studies of science might be an epistemological relativism that makes science impotent in the cause of leftist politics. They called for a return to a materialist analysis of political economy.… [The] emphasis on epistemology made it more difficult to realize the ontological implications of the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing, that is, how both, when taken together, suggested a rethinking of the relationship of nature and technology, body and machine, the lively and the inert, the virtual and the real, all befitting the age of teletechnology. The cultural studies of science and the early criticism ethnographic writing, I am suggesting, pointed to a new understanding of materialism and a revision of ontology, both of which are needed in the age of teletechology.” [Patricia Ticineto Clough, “On the Relationship of the Criticism of Ethnographic Writing and the Cultural Studies of Science.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 1, number 2, May 2001. Pages 240-270.]

“… we can now make our contrasts with theology more precise in order to sharpen our sense for what simple freedom might be. In the divine analogy, God, however unfathomable, has characteristics of omniscient intentions and transcendental substance. My argument for simple freedom has no need for either predicate. So, if one secular analogue to a substantial God outside creation is the event of the Big Bang, there is no reason we cannot imagine such a total outside to created nature as being latent anywhere at any time, not just at a single position—so, for example, random shifts in the quantum states of electrons represent multiple origins of distinct chains of physical causes, as do random genetic variations. Beginnings in such instances can break out anywhere—thus, creation is not the transcendent act of a final substance, but the multiple events of a creatio continua [Latin, creātiō continuā, ‘continuous creation’] characteristic of an always-incomplete world.” [Benjamin Robinson, “Simple Freedom.” Modern Language Notes. Volume 130, number 3, April 2015. Pages 487-505.]

“In this paper, we present a reflexive approach to research design as a means to enhance the reflexivity of the students and thereby enrich their learning experience of research methodology as a reflective practice. We contribute to the growing literature arguing that research methodology should not be considered or taught as beginning from a predetermined starting point or as proceeding through a fixed sequence of steps. Research is a reflective process, i.e. a process that involves continuous alignments and adjustments between different components of the design.…

“We have experienced a crucial limitation in the many courses and textbooks that are based on the assumption that research methodology involves the application of methods to technical problems, and accordingly on the assumption that teaching research methodology is an add-on process, i.e. about accumulation and reproduction of performance skills and competencies, technical tips and tricks. However, we find that research is better described as involving the alignment and adjustment of methodological choices and considerations, i.e. higher-order abilities, such as the ability to critically reflect on how to apply methods and techniques in specific research projects. As such, it involves continuous critical-constructive reflection on how to align and adjust methods and techniques them to the research purpose, problems and possibilities at hand.”

[Lars Bækgaard and Christian T. Lystbæk, “From Methods to Design: Teaching Research Methodology as a Reflective Practice.” European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management Studies. Editor, unknown. Kidmore End, England: Kidmore End Academic Conferences International Limited. June, 2016. Pages 43-50.]

“It should be … [stated] that Critical Theorists have also been amongst the most vehement critics of western (instrumental) reason precisely because of its emphasis on domination and control, and the way this squeezes other aspects of life to the margins. But equally they have not succumbed to the idea that ‘difference’ per se is a virtue, demanding instead that reason in its various guises be informed by the (universal) human condition. A flat rejection of the universal, which often lies behind postmodernism’s apparently radical cachet, entails an unwitting but essentially conservative stance. If one isolates local or marginalized forms of reason from any wider or potentially universal conception of validity, we have no means of evaluating them. They can only be affirmed in their particularity and thereby assumed to be legitimate.” [Alan How. Critical Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2003. Page 177.]

“My own interest in cultural studies emerges from an ongoing project to theorize the regulatory and emancipatory relationship among culture, power, and politics as expressed through the dynamics of what I call public pedagogy. Such a project concerns, in part, the diverse ways in which culture functions as a contested sphere over the production, distribution, and regulation of power, and how and where it operates both symbolically and institutionally as an educational, political, and economic force. Drawing upon a long tradition in cultural studies work, I take up culture as constitutive and political, not only reflecting larger forces but also constructing them; in this instance, culture not only mediates history but shapes it. I want to argue that culture is the primary terrain for realizing the political as an articulation and intervention into the social, a space in which politics is pluralized, recognized as contingent, and open to many formations.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Volume 1, number 1, March 2004. Pages 59-79.]

“Within neo-liberalism’s market-driven discourse, corporate power marks the space of a new kind of public pedagogy, and one in which the production, dissemination, and circulation of ideas emerge from the educational force of the larger culture. Public pedagogy in this sense refers to a powerful ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain. Corporate public pedagogy culture largely cancels out or devalues gender, class-specific, and racial injustices of the existing social order by absorbing the democratic impulses and practices of civil society within narrow economic relations. Corporate public pedagogy has become an all-encompassing cultural horizon for producing market identities, values, and mega-corporate conglomerates, and for atomizing social practices. Politics becomes increasingly privatized and commercialized and, as such, utterly banal.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: making the political more pedagogical.” Policy Futures in Education. Volume 2, numbers 3 and 4, 2004. Pages 494-503.]

“Cultural politics matters because it is the pedagogical site on which identities are formed, subject positions are made available, social agency enacted, and cultural forms both reflect and deploy power through their modes of ownership and mode of public pedagogy. Critical theorists from Herbert Marcuse to Theodor Adorno have always recognized that the most important forms of domination are not simply economic but also cultural and that the pedagogical force of the culture with its emphasis on belief and persuasion is a crucial element of how we both think about politics and enact forms of resistance and social transformation.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Critical Pedagogy and the Postmodern/Modern Divide: Towards a Pedagogy of Democratization.” Teacher Education Quarterly. Volume 34, number 1, winter 2004. Pages 31-47.]

“I want to examine briefly some populist examples of the new nationalism that speak from different places in the cultural apparatuses that shape public opinion. In different ways, these populist voices advocate a pedagogy and politics of national identity that serve to reproduce some reactionary ele ments of the new nationalism. For example, expressions of the new nationalism can be found in several sites: in the backlash against multiculturalism in the public schools and universities; in the rise of the English Only move ment; in the notion of the state as a ‘stern parent’ willing to inflict harsh measures on welfare mothers; and in educational reforms demanding a national curriculum.” [Henry A. Giroux, “National Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism.” College Literature. Volume 22, number 2, June 1995. Pages 42-57.]

“In a complex and rapidly changing global world, public intellectuals have the important task of taking back control over the conditions of intellectual production in a variety of venues in which the educational force of the culture takes root and holds a powerful grip over the stories, images, and sounds that shape people’s lives around the globe. Such sites constitute what I call ‘new spheres of public pedagogy’ and represent crucial locations for a cultural politics designed to wrest the arena of public debate within the field of global power away from those dangerous forces that endlessly commodify intellectual autonomy and critical thought while appropriating or undercutting any viable work done through the collective action of critical intellectuals.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Higher Education Under Siege: Implications for Public Intellectuals.” Thought & Action. Volume 22, number 2, fall 2006. Pages 63-78.]

“For several decades, right-wing extremists have labored to put into place an ultraconservative reeducation machine—an apparatus for producing and disseminating a public pedagogy in which everything tainted with the stamp of liberal origin and the word ‘public’ would be contested and destroyed.…

“… Why aren’t the unions producing their own forms of public pedagogy, educating the larger public about the nature of the crisis of higher education, particularly as it translates into a crisis of opportunity, public life, and democracy itself?”

[Henry A. Giroux, “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.” Works and Days. Volume 26/27, 2008/2009. Pages 45-71.]

“Neoliberalism is the latest stage of predatory capitalism and is part of a broader project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital. It is a political and economic project that constitutes an ideology, mode of governance, policy, and form of public pedagogy. As an ideology, it construes profit-making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational belief in the market to solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life free of government regulations, driven by a survival of the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social costs.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Democracy in Crisis, the Specter of Authoritarianism, and the Future of Higher Education.” Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs. Volume 1, article 7, 2015. Pages 101-113.]

“Market fundamentalism increasingly appears at odds with any viable notion of critical education, and seems even more ominous as it aligns itself with the ideologies of militarism and religious fundamentalism. The democratic character of critical pedagogy is defined largely through a set of basic assumptions, which holds that knowledge, power, values, and institutions must be made available to critical scrutiny, be understood as a product of human labor (as opposed to God-given), and evaluated in terms of how they might open up or close down democratic practices and experiences. Yet, critical pedagogy is about more than simply holding authority accountable through the close reading of texts, the creation of radical classroom practices, or the promotion of critical literacy. It is also about linking learning to social change, education to democracy, and knowledge to acts of intervention in public life.” [Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, “Challenging Neoliberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 6, number 1, February 2006. Pages 21-32.]

“Learning takes place in a variety of public spheres outside of the schools, and while it is urgent for progressives to defend public and higher education against the ravaging influence of corporate culture, which means defending it as a public asset rather than as a private investment, we must also connect what is taught in the larger culture to the problems of youth and the challenges of radical democracy in a newly constituted global public. Progressive education in an age of rampant neo-liberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle. Crucial here is a conception of the political that is open yet committed, respects specificity and difference without erasing global considerations, and provides new spaces for collaborative work engaged in productive social change. The time has come for educators to develop more systemic political projects in which power, history, and social movements can play an active role in constructing the multiple and shifting political relations and cultural practices necessary for connecting the construction of diverse political constituencies to the revitalization of democratic public life.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a critical theory of educational struggle.” Educational Philosophy and Theory. Volume 35, number 1, January 2003. Pages 5-16.]

“Pedagogy as a critical practice in which students learn to be attentive and responsible to the memories and narratives of others disappears within a corporate driven notion of learning. Unfortunately, the reductive transmission approach to pedagogy underscored in current reforms cancels out some of the most important aspects of critical teaching: making knowledge relevant to students’ lives; providing supportive environments in which students can learn; and developing a range of teaching approaches and forms of assessment based on the recognition that not every student learns the same way.” [Henry A. Giroux and Michèle Schmidt, “Closing the Achievement Gap: A Metaphor for Children Left Behind.” Journal of Educational Change. Volume 5, issue 3, September 2004. Pages 213-228.]

“[Donald John] Trump is the symbol of a new authoritarianism, which is to say, the sign of a democracy unable to protect and sustain itself. Trump represents corporate domination set free, a political and economic engine that both fuels and feeds on fear and intolerance. He is also the endpoint of a long-standing political system that is ‘part bread-and-circuses spectacle, part celebrity obsession, and part media money machine.’ Trump is the symbol of a frightened society that is increasingly seduced to choose the swagger of a vigilante strongman over the processes of collective sovereignty, the gun over diplomacy, and the wall instead of the bridge. Trump’s public rants and humiliating snipes make for great TV, and are, as Frank Rich once argued, ‘another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.’ What the American public needs is an ongoing analysis of Trump’s messaging in the context of the historical legacies of white bigotry and intolerance, and an analysis of how right-wing politics have tapped such bigotry to further the self-serving interests of a small economic elite. Such an analysis would situate Trump in the context of the historical racism that has smoldered as a form low-intensity warfare in the United States since its inception, and that has arguably worsened for communities of color since the rise of neo-conservativism in the 1980s. Trump has simply discarded the euphemisms and deploys the ruse of national security to take bigotry, sexism, xenophobia, and political bullying to more aggressive levels.” [Henry A. Giroux. America at War with Itself. San Francisco, California: Open Media Series imprint of City Lights Books. 2017. Pages 31-32.]

“The goal of educated hope is not to liberate the individual from the social—a central tenet of neoliberalism—but to take seriously the notion that the individual can only be liberated through the social. Educated hope as a subversive, defiant practice should provide a link, however transient, provisional, and contextual, between vision and critique on the one hand, and engagement and transformation on the other. That is, for hope to be consequential it has to be grounded in a project that has some hold on the present. Hope becomes meaningful to the degree that it identifies agencies and processes, offers alternatives to an age of profound pessimism, reclaims an ethic of compassion and justice, and struggles for those institutions in which equality, freedom, and justice flourish as part of the ongoing struggle for a global democracy.” [Henry A. Giroux, “When Hope is Subversive.” Tikkun: to heal, repair, and transform the world. Volume 19, number 6, 2004. Pages 38-40.]

“Within neoliberalism’s market-driven discourse, corporate culture becomes both the model for the good life and the paradigmatic sphere for defining individual success and fulfillment. I use the term corporate culture to refer to an ensemble of ideological and institutional forces that functions politically and pedagogically both to govern organizational life through senior managerial control and to fashion compliant workers, depoliticized consumers, and passive citizens. Within the language and images of corporate culture, citizenship is portrayed as an utterly privatized affair whose aim is to produce competitive self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain. Reformulating social issues as strictly private concerns, corporate culture functions largely to either cancel out or devalue social, class-specific, and racial injustices of the existing social order by absorbing the democratic impulses and practices of civil society within narrow economic relations. Corporate culture becomes an all-encompassing horizon for producing market identities, values, and practices. The good life, in this discourse, ‘is construed in terms of our identities as consumers—we are what we buy.’ The good life now means living inside the world of corporate brands.” [Henry A. Giroux, “Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The University as a Democratic public sphere.” Harvard Educational Review. Volume 72, number 4, winter 2002. Pages 425-463.]

“Donald Trump is the biggest popular vote loser in history to ever call himself President-Elect. In spite of the fact that he has no mandate, he will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image. If progressives are going to stop this, we must stand indivisibly opposed to Trump and the members of Congress (MoCs) who would do his bidding. Together, we have the power to resist — and we have the power to win.

“We know this because we’ve seen it before. The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own MoCs to reject President [Barack] Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism — and they won.

“We believe that protecting our values, our neighbors, and ourselves will require mounting a similar resistance to the Trump agenda — but a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance, and fairness. Trump is not popular. He does not have a mandate. He does not have large congressional majorities. If a small minority in the Tea Party can stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.

“To this end, the following chapters offer a step-by-step guide for individuals, groups, and organizations looking to replicate the Tea Party’s success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents. The guide is intended to be equally useful for stiffening Democratic spines and weakening pro-Trump Republican resolve.

“We believe that the next four years depend on Americans across the country standing indivisible against the Trump agenda. We believe that buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions will only further empower Trump to victimize us and our neighbors. We hope that this guide will provide those who share that belief useful tools to make Congress listen.”

[Angel Padilla, Billy Fleming, Caroline Kavit, Ezra Levin, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Jennay Ghowrwal, Jeremy Haile, Leah Greenberg, Matt Traldi, Sara Clough, Sarah Dohl, et al. Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda. Location and publisher unknown. December 31st, 2016. Creative Commons. Page 3.]

“The mockery of the aspirations of the intellect has been a central theme of comedy from Aristophanes to Oscar Wilde, and from George Bernard Shaw to Woody Allen. And what is funny about the aspirations of the intellect is what is tragic about those same aspirations from the point of view of tragedy: the inevitable failure of the attempt to detach oneself from the body – the personal body, the social body, and the material contingencies of life in general.

“We are most familiar with Philosophy’s traditional disdain for the body in the form of the dominant tendency to view instinctual response and emotional reaction as requiring the scrutiny of a dispassionate reason, but never the other way around.”

[Susan Bordo, “The Cultural Overseer and the Tragic Hero: Comedic and Feminist Perspectives on the Hubris of Philosophy.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Volume 65, number 2, summer 1982. Pages 181-205.]

“The principle of historical specification as illustrated by the preceding examples (landed property and the various forms of capital) is strictly adhered to by [Karl] Marx. He deals with all categories of his economic and socio-historical research in that specific form and in that specific connection in which they appear in modern bourgeois society. He does not treat them as eternal categories. Nor does he, for that matter, transform himself into an historian. While fully aware of the different specific forms in which many economic categories of modern bourgeois society had occurred in earlier epochs, he does not go into the history of ‘money,’ of ‘exchange of commodities,’ of ‘wage-labour,’ or of that of ‘cooperation,’ ‘division of labour,’ etc. He discusses the different stages of the historical development of all these economic concepts, and of the political, juridical, and other ideological concepts bound up with them, only in so far as it is necessary for his main theme, i.e. the specific character assumed by them in modern bourgeois society.…

“The principle of historical specification, besides its theoretical significance as an improved method of sociological analysis and research, becomes of first-rate importance as a polemical weapon in the practical struggle waged against the existing conditions of society. The manner in which this weapon is wielded by the Marxists appears most clearly in a section of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, dealing with ‘the bourgeois objections to communism.’ One basic form of argument recurs in all the replies to the bourgeois indictment of communism. In answer to the accusation that they want to abolish property, individuality, liberty, culture, law, family, ‘fatherland,’ etc., the communists say that the point at issue is not the general conditions of all social life but only the specific historical form assumed by them in present-day bourgeois society. All economic, class, and other characters constituting that specific historical form are discussed, with the result that the would-be defenders of the natural and necessary foundations of society are revealed to be the biassed protagonists of the particular conditions of the existing bourgeois order and the particular needs of the bourgeois class.…

“By this process of an historical specification of all bourgeois institutions, and by insistence on the constant working of change, materialistic science achieves in a theoretical way what is achieved in practice by the real historical movement of the proletariat. Thus Marx’s materialistic social research though not for a moment abandoning its character of a strictly theoretical science, yet consciously assumes its particular function within the whole of a movement striving to transform existing society, and thus constitutes itself as a necessary part of the revolutionary action of the modern working class.”

[Karl Korsch. Karl Marx. Pacifica, California: Marxists Internet Archive (Marxists.org) ebook edition. 1938.]

“The control of the workers over the production of their own lives win not come from their occupying the positions, on the international and world markets, abandoned by the self-destroying and so-called free competition of the monopolistic owners of the means of production. This control can only result from a planned intervention by all the classes today excluded from it into a production which today is already tending in every way to be regulated in a monopolistic and planned fashion.” [Karl Korsch, “Ten Theses on Marxism Today.” Andrew Giles-Peters, translator. Telos. Number 26, winter 1975–1976. Pagination unknown.]

“… the historical development of Marxist theory presents the following picture. The first manifestation of it naturally remained essentially unchanged in the minds of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels themselves throughout the later period, although in their writings it did not stay entirely unaltered. In spite of all their denials of philosophy, this first version of the theory is permeated through and through with philosophical thought. It is a theory of social development seen and comprehended as a living totality; or, more precisely, it is a theory of social revolution comprehended and practised as a living totality.… Of course, it is not only economics, politics and ideology, but also the historical process and conscious social action that continue to make up the living unity of ‘revolutionary practice’ ….” [Karl Korsch. Marxism and Philosophy. Fred Halliday, translator. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2008. Page 57.]

“The Hegelian philosophy and its dialectical method cannot be understood without taking into account its relationship to revolution.…

“The Hegelian philosophy and its dialectical method cannot be criticized without taking into account its relationship to the particular historical conditions of the revolutionary movement of the time.”

[Karl Korsch. A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism. Pacifica, California: Marxists Internet Archive (Marxists.org) ebook edition. 1946.]

“The most striking way in which Karl Korsch actually distinguished himself from the other Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s was, however, in his stress on the ‘specific’ nature of Marxism. For Korsch, Marxism was first and above all else a revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marxism was not a utopian vision of a future for humanity, it was simply the science of the working class under late capitalism. This approach is especially clear in his biography of [Karl] Marx, in which Korsch argued that such a specific interpretation of Marxism, as a critique of late capitalism, is the only way to restore Marxism as a message of hope: ‘The principle of historical specification, besides its original significance as an improved method of sociological analysis and research, becomes of first-rate importance as a polemical weapon in the practical struggle waged against the existing conditions of society.’ One critic of this approach was Karl Kautsky, in the mid-1920s still one of the main theorists of German Social Democracy.…

“It is useful to compare Karl Korsch with his contemporary, Georg Lukács. Like Korsch, Lukács stressed the need for a dialectical Marxism and the need to link Marxist theory to Marxist practice. Like his friend Korsch, Lukács developed as a Marxist writer. He went through an early ultra-left period, before moving towards the heart of the classical Marxism tradition, as he assimilated the lessons of the Russian Revolution.”

[Dave Renton, “Karl Korsch.” What Next? Number 16, 2000. Web. No pagination.]

“Marxism and Philosophy offers four essays by Karl Korsch, all translated by Fred Halliday who also contributes an introduction dealing with the author’s life. Korsch, until 1926 a prominent member of the German Community Party and the Third International, was, with [Georg] Lukács, one of the first Marxists to argue the important of re-examining the writings of the young Marx.” [H. Malcolm Macdonald, “Marxism and Philosophy.” Review article. Social Science Quarterly. Volume 53, number 1, June 1972. Pages 182-183.]

“For Karl Korsch, one of the most provocative European Marxists of the 1920’s and 1930’s, the relationship between Marxism and philosophy is not one of synthesis or similarity, but one of transcendence ….” [Gerson S. Sher, “Marxism and Philosophy.” Review article. Contemporary Sociology. Volume 2, number 1, January 1973. Pages 28-32.]

“Etymologically speaking, a heresy is an opinion, a choice. The word is used in Christian religion as a ‘thing chosen.’ It is also what a belief that is founded on religious doctrine is to its orthodox nature, which is why the Christian Church conceived heresy as adherence to a false doctrine. Alfredo Guevara talks about heresy, but at the same time he is also alluding to the fact that ‘freedom could be limiting’: ‘No hay pontífices, o no podrá haberlos. Esto supone libertad absolute y absolute lucidez, coherencia absoluta. De otro modo, la libertad deviene limitación’ [There are no pontiffs, or there can be no pontiffs. This implies absolute freedom and absolute lucidity, absolute coherence. Otherwise, freedom becomes a limitation.] …. In other words, Alfredo Guevara argues that there should be freedom of speech without constraints, and then makes intellectuals responsible for their own freedom of speech: ‘absoluta lucidez, coherencia absoluta’ [absolute clarity, absolute coherence]. That is, he is affirming that intellectuals need to censure themselves by being aware of the limit of their own freedom. According to this logic, it is up to the state to determine whether or not discourse is revolutionary, whereas intellectuals have the mission to censor their own writing. The corollary is that cultural institutions have the right to determine if heresies are false doctrines. Intellectuals have to censor their own writing not to commit a heresy that revolutionary institutions could interpret as false doctrine They must be heroes who can relinquish their own subjectivity By having to censor themselves, intellectuals have to constrain their writing.” [Marta Hernández Salván, “Heterodox Marxism.” CR: The New Centennial Review Volume 12, number 2, fall 2012. Pages 151-181.]

“The gendered framework of family viewing

“The research reported below concerns two different types of research questions regarding, on the one hand, how television is interpreted by its audiences and, on the other, how television material is used in different families.…

“In this research, I took the premise that one should consider the basic unit of consumption of television to be the family/household rather than the individual viewer. This was done to raise questions about how the television set is handled in the home, how decisions are made—by which family members, at what times, what is watched—and how responses to different kinds of materials are discussed within the family, and so on. In short, this represents an attempt to analyse individual viewing activity within the household/familial relations in which it commonly operates.”

[David Morley. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Page 131.]

“There is no necessary conflict between ecocentric norms and Critical Theory. Rather, the relationship is one of mutual reliance. One key task for the realissation of the aims of both Critical Theory and ecocentric norms is the development of a strong public sphere. In this discursive arena, the industrialist presuppositions of profitability would not be the deciding force. Rather, the public space defines an arena in which ecological politics would take place and meaningful disagreements and debates about our society and the actions necessary to foster ecological sustainability would be carried out” [Robert J. Brulle, “Habermas and Green Political Thought: Two Roads Converging.” Environmental Politics. Volume 11, number 4, winter 2002. Pages 1-20.]

“We have established the differences between ecologism and other major political ideologies, and the incompatibility between what I have called environmentalism and ecologism is now clear. Ecologism seeks radically to call into question a whole series of political, economic and social practices in a way that environmentalism does not. Ecologism envisages a post-industrial future quite distinct from that with which we are most generally acquainted.…

“In terms of human relationships with the non-human natural world, ecologism asks that the onus of justification be shifted from those who argue that the non-human natural world should be given political voice to those who think it should not. Environmentalists will usually be concerned about ‘nature’ only so far as it might affect human beings; ecologists will argue that the strong anthropocentrism this betrays is more a part of our current problems than a solution to them.”

[Andrew Dobson. Green Political Thought. Fourth edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 189.]

“My argument has been that if we are only concerned with political outcomes, then green democracy may well be in trouble because such a concern undermines many of the necessary conditions for democracy. However, if we agree that the way we make decisions is a central part of green philosophy, then we begin to set rules by which we must conduct ourselves which, as long as they are not incompatible with democracy (and the important point is that they need not be), provide a solid basis for green decision making. I have also shown, in later sections, the types of theory which may be taken into account (ecocentrism, holism) and the opportunities which polities offer for the incorporation of such ideas (e.g. quality of democracy issues, legal standing, decision making, representation).

“Does this mean that green political theory (or a future green government) is unconcerned with political outcomes? Clearly this cannot be the case because the ending of the ecological crisis and the achievement of a sustainable society is a green goal and a green good. We can get around this problem in two ways. First, by arguing for an indirect holism that emphasises tendencies within our orientation towards the ‘biotic community.’ Second, we can establish the significance of goals by arguing that political outcomes are important to green political theory to the extent that those outcomes may be adverse or unintended consequences of policy. This does not mean that certain ends have to be prescribed by green political theory, but rather, that it recognises the need to evaluate the decisions which are made to ensure there is some correspondence between what the decision makers intended and what actually happened.”

[Mike Mills, “Green Democracy: The search for an ethical solution.” Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, rights and citizenship. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 95-111.]

“… the emancipatory project which is shaped by—and in turn constitutes—ecological citizens depends on the revitalisation and extension of civil society. It depends upon the active transformation of private life through creation of a ‘green conscience’, and increased democratic influence over the economic sphere through the actions of ‘green workers,’ ‘green producers’ and ‘green consumers’. This is reflected in the high value which green theorists and activists place on self-rule. This value includes the moral priority given to ‘self-restraint’ within civil society and also to active citizenship as defined by individual (self-)development beyond a merely instrumental relationship to the public sphere; a sense of active responsibility for representation and protection of environmental rights, and the individual and collective use of the public sphere and the state to provide the formal opportunities and protection for the institutions of ecologically guided democracy.” [Peter Christoff, “Ecological Citizens and Ecologically Guided Democracy.” Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, rights and citizenship. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 149-166.]

“What do we understand by ecological restructuring? Restructuring is akin to transforming as opposed to abolishing the state and the status quo. It is not a dogmatic attempt to create a completely new world that knows no pollution at all and that is clean and beautiful in all respects.… The whole society does not have to be altered, not every stone has to be moved. It encompasses further-reaching changes and reforms on a middle to long term, that can be readjusted, that are aimed at the prevention and solution of the most aggravating forms of pollution and at acute forms of degradation of the environment.… This kind of restructuring will bear the character of compromise and will have to be accomplished in democratic ways. They must be the result of open discussions, of imaginative power, and of the preparedness to accept disagreeble measures.” [Marius de Geus, “The Ecological Restructuring of the State.” Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, rights and citizenship. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 185-206.]

“… I am suggesting that in the contemporary conjuncture, culture’s position is being weakened in favor of the economic. The economic is becoming the domain in which history is made and experienced and resistance defined. Even more, I am hypothesizing that the significant locus of the constitution and experience of change is in the economic and economies— but I do not think this is simply equivalent to the (mistaken) claim of an economization of social life. I will suggest … that there is an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ that is being constituted within and is constitutive of the domain of economics ‘directly,’ increasingly foregrounding matters of what we have to call economic culture. And this partly grounds, I think, the saliency of cultural economy as a set of concerns. But at the same time, if we are to make sense of such changes, we must give up a vision of the social formation as comprised of separate levels or domains and seek a new practice of conjunctural thinking.” [Lawrence Grossberg. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2010. Page 151.]

“… Cultural Studies in the Future Sense evidently adopts an ethical stance – opposing ‘a single logic of productivity and efficiency’ in matters of cultural analysis, and seeking to open up consideration of modernities, as well as seeking to bridge the analysis of culture and economy in new ways. For all its rhetorics of not knowing, I think [Lawrence] Grossberg knows very well where his political allegiances lie.” [Matt Hills, “Cultural Studies in the Future Tense.” Review article. Culture Machine. September, 2012. Pages 1-4.]

“In one of the most exciting chapters of Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, [Lawrence] Grossberg encourages cultural studies scholars to take up economics. But this isn’t the usual move to remind us that political economy is important, and it isn’t the usual interdisciplinarity that wants to adjust the disciplinary mix by adding a little bit more economic materialism. Grossberg’s relentless ambition is at its most vivid here: he doesn’t want cultural studies practitioners just to read a few books on economics (though he does admit that this might be a good place to start) but to go beyond the endless modelling that preoccupies much of academic economics …. This is the other side of interdisciplinarity: the desire to critically extend the disciplinary fields that you’re interacting with. If interdisciplinarity can often feel like ‘blagging it’ in several places at once, Grossberg’s demand is to reach a level of critical competence in the discipline to be able to convincingly intervene within it. The result might mean making common cause with radical heterodox economics scholars and activists.” [Ben Highmore, “Cultural Studies in Its Mirror Phase.” New Formations. Volume 78, summer 2012. Pages 179-187.]

“I will close this essay with some brief suggestions for what a ‘blue cultural studies’ – a criticism that takes seriously the place of the ocean in early modern history and culture – might look like.

“… Fishing may never have been as central as keeping sheep to early modern English poetry, but poets and writers engaged more directly with the oceanic world than we tend to remember.…

“Finally, a blue cultural studies must consider the physical environment as a substantial partner in the creation of cultural meaning. While ideologies of land ownership, especially around enclosure, have long been a part of the discourse of early modern literary criticism, too little attention has been paid to the ways in which prolonged exposure to the deep sea challenged early modern legal, scientific, and literary habits of thought. In this moment of ecocriticism and environmentalism, the mind-stretching vastness of the sea provides powerful food for thought.”

[Steven Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature.” Literature Compass. Volume 6, issue 5, September 2009. Pages 997-1013.]

“The May/June 1996 issue of Lingua Franca included a now well-known article by New York University physicist Alan Sokal describing an unusual experiment. In 1994, Sokal submitted a parody of cultural studies of science to a journal, Social Text, as if it were a serious academic paper. According to Sokal, the purpose of his ‘little experiment’ … was to see whether the journal would publish ‘an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.’ The editorial collective that controls the content of the journal, which is not peer reviewed, failed to identify the article as a parody and published it …. Sokal triumphantly announced the hoax in Lingua Franca.” [Stephen Hilgartner, “The Sokal Affair in Context.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. Volume 22, number 4, autumn 1997. Pages 506-522.]

“The scandal of the [Alan] Sokal hoax was marked, then, by a confusion between the discursive bloc of postmodernism and the field of science studies. When the scandal filtered through to the mass public sphere, the distinction between these fields was erased, and the stakes of the scandal were defined simply in terms of a quarrel between the sciences and the literary academy, the two cultures.… Science studies itself, as it is actually and diversely practiced, disappeared as the main target of media attack. The public misconstruction of science studies thus unwittingly confirmed the literary academy’s desire to annex science studies to a theoretical program internal to its own discipline (roughly indicated by the name of postmodernism), as well as its desire to conscript science studies into the culture wars (the scene of its external politics).” [John Guillory, “The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism.” Critical Inquiry. Volume 28, number 2, winter 2002. Pages 470-508.]

“Significantly, [Alan] Sokal starts out with genuine quotations by the founders of subatomic physics, and not all of the quotations he cites subsequently are as absurd as has been suggested. Commenting on the purported significance of the hoax, Sokal reveals himself to hold an unreflective, naively realist theory of knowledge which is not at all shared by many of the major scientist-interpreters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics. Indeed, most of the founders of quantum mechanics, and several important founders of chaos theory, hold views that Sokal dismisses in a philistine manner when confronted with similar opinions in nonscientific texts.” [Val Dusek, “Philosophy of Math and Physics in the Sokal Affair.” Social Text. Number 50, spring 1997. Pages 135-138.]

“The Sokal hoax played into and reinforced many of the divisions that have been opened up in the Culture Wars' prolonged backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and the queer renaissance. We hear more and more progressives, not unlike [Alan] Sokal himself, appealing to Enlightenment ideals of universality and common value as a prescription for rescuing the Left from its patronage of the politics of social identity. Left-wing jeremiads inform us that in our preoccupation with race, gender, and sexuality, we are being led astray. Inevitably, such voices recall the reason why the label of political correctness was first devised—in order to temper the knowingness of those who dwelled on the errors of others. What made the Sokal affair an unusual, but germane, event in the Culture Wars was that it gave rise to an outbreak of old-style correctness, complete with impatient calls for purges of a faux Left.” [Andrew Ross, “Reflections on the Sokal Affair.” Social Text. Number 50, spring 1997. Pages 149-152.]

“One of the most salient aspects of the affair has been [Alan] Sokal’s recourse to the mainstream media to conduct an ideological campaign against another section of the Left. Sokal has used the media skilfully, both to register his hoax and to generalise its point into a full-scale attack on ‘cultural studies of science’ and ‘postmodern cultural studies’ (which he tends to treat as equivalents). And for many on the Left, his hoax was a welcome public counter to the attention-grabbing ‘relativism’ of much recent cultural theory. Yet Sokal has also provided the press with an ideal occasion to prosecute two of its favourite pastimes – disparaging intellectualism, of any kind, and travestying the Left – while bolstering the sagging image of the ‘scientist’ as a figure of authority and a man of reason and good sense.” [Peter Osborne, “Friendly fire: The hoaxing of Social Text.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 81, January/February 1997. Pages 54-56.]

“When Social Text entitled its Spring 1996 issue ‘Science Wars,’ it fulfilled its own prophecy. Thanks to Alan Sokal’s now famous parody article, which was published there undetected, a discursive war immediately erupted.” [Bruce Robbins, “Science-envy: Sokal, science and the police.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 88, March/April 1998. Pages 2-5.]

“It is sad to say, but nonetheless true, that some scholars on the academic left have renounced materialism and strayed into a postmodern wonderland in which there is no objective reality and any one factual claim is as good as the next. Such scholars deserve the criticism to which they have been subjected, and one can’t blame [Alan] Sokal, a leftist himself who taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua under the Sandinista government, for exposing them as intellectual frauds. However, one of the misconceptions that has emerged out of the Sokal affair is that the left is dominated by anti-intellectualism, and by implication, that the right is the defender of reason. Nothing could be further from the truth.” [Richard York and Brett Clark, “Debunking as Positive Science: Reflections in Honor of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 57, issue 9, February 2006. Pages 3-15.]

“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.” [Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text. Number 46/47, spring–summer 1996. Pages 217-252.]

“Why did I do it? While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore – questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.” [Alan D. Sokal, “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies.” Lingua Franca. May/June 1996. Pages 62-64.]

“But why did I do it? I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be ‘true,’ why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don’t aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.)” [Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword.” Philosophy and Literature. Volume 20, number 2, October 1996. Pages 338-346.]

“Endoscopic techniques have changed medical practices dramatically, particularly the skills of surgeons, the setting of the operating theater and the involvement of the patient. Double-serving as a media technology, endoscopy has also profoundly affected the ways in which the interior body is conceptualized and represented in popular media such as television. The interplay of technology, medical practice and cultural appropriation becomes manifest in what I will refer to as the ‘endoscopic gaze.’ … In the past 50 years, our perspective on the interior body – mediated by the surgeon’s eye – has shifted from outside to inside. We no longer peer from the outside in, through an incision in the skin, but instruments allow us ‘immediate’ access to the body’s tiniest details. This insider’s point of view vis-à-vis the body has, meanwhile, pervaded our culture.” [José van Dijck, “Bodies without borders: The endoscopic gaze.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 4, number 2, 2001. Pages 219-237.]

“… in order for Popular Culture Studies to progress in the desired way, we need to expand our perspective, internationalizing them and becoming ‘increasingly sophisticated about the intricacies and complexities of multiculturalism.’ And we need to blend that sophistication into greater understanding of multinationalistic, ethnic, linguistic, cultish and religious deterministic thrusts into society. We are at a crossroads in Popular Culture Studies and at the opening of several new highway chains.… On the computers of cultures, it is becoming perfectly clear, the lights are flashing all over the screen, alerting us to a sense of urgency in the Humanities and social sciences and the need for certain realizations.” [Ray R. Browne, “Internationalizing Popular Culture Studies.” Journal of Popular Culture. Volume 30, number 1, summer 1996. Pages 21-37.]

“In the early stages, … the field of popular culture studies was filled with considerable questioning of its validity, of its role, and of its definition. At first many scholars, basing their definitions on the most powerful elements of culture they experienced every day, defined popular culture as the electronic media—TV, movies, radio, MTV. Now, however, most agree that such a definition was too restrictive. Normally we see popular culture as including all aspects of the world we inhabit: the way of life we inherit, practice, and pass on to our descendants; what we do while we are awake; the physical conditions in which we sleep; and the dreams we dream while sleeping.” [Ray B. Browne, “Culture ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ (growth of popular culture studies).” National Forum. Volume 74, issue 4, fall 1994. Pages 9-12.]

“… cultural studies of science and technology stress the ways various media—from telegraph and telephone to radio, film, TV, and computer—influence art, religion, politics, commerce, and the ways we think about ourselves and our world. Popular culture studies further enhance our understandings of the marketing, appropriation, and subtle semiotic powers of contemporary technoscience. The photograph invites painting tomove toward the abstract and expressionist, the novel is restructured to incorporate the flashback of the cinema, and political debate adapts to the enclosed space and attention structure of the television.” [Carl Mitcham, “Why Science, Technology, and Society Studies?” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. Volume 19, number 2, April 1999. Pages 128-134.]

“The Andy Grifitth Show is a nostalgic American popular cultural masterpiece valid for all time and is consistently ranked in th top ten television shows. Learning its origins, revealing some behind-the-scenes aspects, and reviewing many of the episodes have led to the identification of specific factors that have contributed to the show’s phenomenal success and endurance. Here, [Don Rodney] Vaughan discusses the show’s importance to popular culture studies.…

“The Andy Griffith Show is not about reflecting or projecting reality. The producers and writers did not attempt to blend the real world and the fictional world. Although some of the episodes made references to real movies, real TV shows, the Korean War, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the scripts never alluded to current events, not even to the four Nixon-Kennedy debates taking place during the first few weeks of The Andy Griffith Show.”

[Don Rodney Vaughan, “Why The Andy Griffith Show Is Important to Popular Cultural Studies.” Journal of Popular Culture. Volume 38, number 2, November 2004. Pages 397-423.]

“Arguably, popular cultural studies in Australia have been struggling to emerge from beneath the shadow of this now-crumbling paradigm [‘the invasive impact of American popular culture’] since the 1960s. Doubly damned by its imported, alien origins and capitalistic nature, popular culture has been either associated with social deterioration by conservative intelligentsia and excluded from their canonical concerns or recognized simply as a significant part of hegemonic domination by left-wing ‘pessimist’ theorists and studied largely as a process of manipulation and alienation. Conversely, its ‘spectacular world of imagery’ has been more recently scanned by populist optimists for any ideological inferences of the ‘active, resistant, joyous or fantastic,’ just as its ‘gleaming facades’ have been glossed by poststructuralists and postmodernists in a decentering fascination for its endless ‘circulation of signs’ and discursive ‘cultural codes.’ Interpretive paradigms, like promises, are clearly made to be eventually broken, and, as Raymond Williams once observed, they ‘are never simply abandoned. Rather they accumulate anomalies until there is an eventual breaking point.’” [Raymond Evans, “‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Paradigm?’: Popular Cultural Studies in Australian History.” The Journal of Popular Culture. Volume 29, issue 1, summer 1995. Pages 163-174.]

“… the real blow against the aristocratic culture of the British Empire came during the American Revolution, a war that would not only give rise to the United States of America, but would also create the ideals that American culture would be based on, ideals that would allow a popular culture to flourish. This thesis paper contends that the political and social climate of the Revolutionary Era was essential in shaping the American ethos that would gradually lead to the pop culture that we know today.” [Avinash R. Chandan. Of the People, By the People, For the People: In Defense of American Pop Culture, its Meaning, and its Impact. Masters of History thesis. Graduate School, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Newark, New Jersey. January, 2013. Page 3.]

“… a [sic; an] intermingled field of popular culture studies and organization studies may have to accept that the phenomena of economy and management are no longer of interest only to ‘organization men’ …. My contention is also that although many scholars would accept this, the field has yet to fully acknowledge the ramifications hereof. Such a way to understand the interplay between popular culture and the world of work organizations would suggest that it is not enough merely to study the ways in which themes from business and management are used in popular culture (e.g. mimic cultural studies), but that the ensuing cultural product have to be taken seriously as forms of economic knowledge.” [Alf Rehn, “Pop (Culture) Goes the Organization: On Highbrow, Lowbrow and Hybrids in Studying Popular Culture Within Organization Studies.” Organization. Volume 15, number 5, 2008. Pages 765-783.]

“It would be a mistake to interpret the 2016 election solely as [Hillary Rodham] Clinton’s loss. [Donald J.] Trump brought assets to the Republican ticket that Mitt Romney did not have in 2012, and ratified a party-building strategy which, while vital to the GOP [Grand Old Party] for decades, had not been fully realized at the presidential level until now. The problem for Romney as a vote-rustler, aside from being an über-representative of the moneyed class, was that his politics of nostalgia was not rooted in anything real—the precarity of people’s lives, their felt experience of economic decline and social quicksand. Nor would he go the extra step to tap the dangerous gas of emotion that historically has fuelled the energies of anxious white people. Romney had no believable way of reaching masses of people at the point of their insecurity.” [JoAnn Wypijewski, “The Politics of Insecurity.” New Left Review. Series II, number 103, January–February 2017. Pages 9-18.]

“… not only from the physical point of view, but also even from the geometrical point of view, as has been shown, ‘qualified’ space is actually the real space; indeed homogeneous space has properly speaking no existence at all, being nothing more than a mere virtuality. In order that it may be measured—and this means, according to the explanations given, in order to be effectively realized—space must necessarily be related to an assemblage of defined directions. These directions moreover present themselves to us as radii emanating from a center, which thus becomes the center of a three-dimensional cross, and it is unnecessary again to call attention to the important part played by these radii in the symbolism of all traditional forms. It may not perhaps be too much to suggest that if the study of the directions of space could be restored to its rightful position of importance, it might become possible to restore to geometry at least a considerable part of the profound meaning that it has lost; but it is of no use to pretend that the work involved might not have to be spread over a very wide field; this will be apparent to anyone who reflects on the extent of the real influence exerted by such considerations on every aspect of the constitution of traditional societies.” [René Guénon. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Fourth revised edition. Lord Northbourne, translator. Hillsdale, New York: Sophia Perennis. 2001. Page 35.]

“We have constantly had occasion to speak of tradition, of traditional doctrines or conceptions, and even of traditional languages, and this is really unavoidable when trying to describe the essential characteristics of Eastern thought in all its modalities; but what, to be exact, is tradition? To obviate one possible misunderstanding, let it be said from the outset that we do not take the word ‘tradition’ in the restricted sense sometimes given to it by Western religious thought, when it opposes ‘tradition’ to the written word, using the former of these two terms exclusively for something that has been the object of oral transmission alone. On the contrary, for us tradition, taken in a much more general sense, may be written as well as oral, though it must usually, if not always, have been oral originally. In the present state of things, however, tradition, whether it be religious in form or otherwise, consists everywhere of two complementary branches, written and oral, and we have no hesitation in speaking of ‘traditional writings,’ which would obviously be contradictory if one only gave to the word ‘tradition’ its more specialized meaning; besides, etymologically, tradition simply means ‘that which is transmitted’ in some way or other. In addition, it is necessary to include in tradition, as secondary and derived elements that are nonetheless important for the purpose of forming a complete picture, the whole series of institutions of various kinds which find their principle in the traditional doctrine itself.” [René Guénon, “What is Meant by Tradition.” The Essential Reneé Guénon: Metaphysics, Tradition, and the Crisis of Modernity. John Herlihy, editor. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc. 2009. Pages 93-96.]

“It must be acknowledged that before the early and violent shakings through which the inner disintegration of the Western world has become evident, even in a material way, the plurality of civilizations (and therefore the relativity of the modem one) no longer appears, as it once used to, as a heterodox and extravagant idea. And yet this is not enough. It is also necessary to be able to recognize that modem civilization is not only liable to disappear without a trace, like many others before it, but also that it belongs to a type, the disappearance of which has merely a contingent value when compared with the order of the “things-that-are” and of every civilization founded on such an order. Beyond the mere and secular idea of the ‘relativism of civilizations,’ it is necessary to recognize a ‘dualism of civilizations.’ The considerations that follow will constantly revolve around the opposition between the modern and die traditional world, and between modem and traditional man; such an opposition is ideal (that is, morphological and metaphysical) and both beyond and more than a merely historical opposition.” [Julius Evola. Revolt Against the Modern World. Guido Stucco, translator. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International. 1995. Pages xxx-xxxi.]

“Since … Italy lacks an authentic ‘traditional’ past, there are some who, in their attempt to organize themselves against the avant-garde of world subversion, and in order to claim some concrete and historical basis, have found a reference point in the principles and institutions of the Fascist era. I wish to uphold the following fundamental principle: if the ‘Fascist ideas’ still deserve to be defended, they should not be defended simply insofar as they are ‘Fascist,’ but rather insofar as they have represented a particular form of the apparition and affirmation of ideas that were older and more elevated than Fascism, ideas that have the character of ‘constants,’ so that they may found again as integral parts of a great European political tradition. To cherish these ideas not according to this spirit, but solely because they are ‘revolutionary,’ original, and proper only to Fascism, would amount to belittling them, adopting a limiting perspective, and making difficult a much needed task of clarification. To those for whom everything begins and ends with Fascism, including those whose political horizons are confined by the mere polemics between Fascism and antifascism and who have no other reference point beside these two poles—these people would hardly be able to distinguish the best potential of the Italian world of the past from some of its aspects that were affected by the same evils that it is necessary to fight against today.” [Julius Evola. Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist. Guido Stucco, translator. Michael Moynihan, editor. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International. 2002. Page 121.]

“What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. To the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today’s world, even at its most problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

“The natural place for such a man, the land in which he would not be a stranger, is the world of Tradition. I use the word tradition in a special sense …. It differs from the common usage, but is close to the meaning given to it by René Guénon in his analysis of the crisis of the modern world. ln this particular meaning, a civilization or a society is ‘traditional’ when it is ruled by principles that transcend what is merely human and individual, and when all its sectors are formed and ordered from above, and directed to what is above. Beyond the variety of historical forms, there has existed an essentially identical and constant world of Tradition. I have sought elsewhere to define its values and main categories, which are the basis for any civilization, society, or ordering of existence that calls itself normal in a higher sense, and is endowed with real significance.”

[Julius Evola. Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul. Joscelyn Godwin, translator. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International. 2003. Page 2.]

“Divine Providence has permitted no mingling of the revealed forms since the time when humanity became divided into different ‘humanities’ and moved away from the Primordial Tradition, the only unique religion possible. For example, the Moslem misinterpretation of the Christian dogma of the Trinity is providential, since the doctrine contained in this dogma is essentially and exclusively esoteric and is not capable of being ‘exotericized’ in any way whatever; Islam had therefore to limit the expansion of this dogma, but this in no way prejudices the existence, within Islam. of the universal truth that is expressed by the dogma in question. On the other hand. it may be useful to point out here that the deification of Jesus and Mary, indirectly attributed to the Christians by the Koran, gives rise to a ‘Trinity’ that this Book nowhere identifies with the Trinity of Christian doctrine but that is nonetheless based on certain realities: firstly, the idea of the ‘Co-Redemptress,’ ‘Mother of God,’ a nonexoteric doctrine that as such could find no place in the religious perspective of Islam; secondly, the Marianism that existed in practice and that from the Islamic point of view constituted a partial usurpation of the worship due to God; and lastly, the ‘ Mariolatry’ of certain Oriental sects against which Islam was bound to react all the more violently in that it bore a close resemblance to Arab paganism.” [Frithjof Schuon. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books imprint of Theosophical Publishing House. 1993. Page 24.]

“It is in … [the] hierarchic universe that man’s life takes place and possesses meaning. Religion is not only the key to the understanding of this universe, but also the central means whereby man is able to journey through the lower stages of existence to the Divine Presence, this journey being nothing other than human life itself as it is understood traditionally. The doctrines, symbols, and rites of a religion possess therefore a meaning which is not confined to the spatiotemporal realm. In contrast to most modern theologians, philosophers, and scholars of religion, who have either consciously or unconsciously adopted the scientistic view that reduces Reality as such to physical or historical reality, the traditionalists refuse to reduce the existence of religion to only the terrestrial and temporal realm. Religion for them is not only the faith and practices of a particular human collectivity which happens to be the recipient of a particular religious message. Religion is not only the faith of the men and women who possess religious faith. It is a reality of Divine Origin. It has its archetype in the Divine Intellect and possesses levels of meaning and reality like the cosmos itself. If a religion were to cease to exist on earth, that does not mean that it would cease to possess any reality whatsoever. In this case its life cycle on earth would have simply come to an end, while the religion itself as an ‘Idea’ in the Platonic sense would subsist in the Divine Intellect in its trans-historical reality. The efficacy of its rites here on earth would cease, but the archetypal reality which the religion represents would persist.

“The traditional school does not neglect the social or psychological aspects of religion, but it refuses to reduce religion to its social or psychological manifestations. Religion in its earthly manifestation comes from the wedding between a Divine Norm and a human collectivity destined providentially to receive the imprint of that Norm. From this wedding is born religion as seen in this world among different peoples and cultures. The differences in the recipient are certainly important and constitute one of the causes for the multiplicity of religious forms and phenomena, but religion itself cannot be reduced to its terrestrial embodiment. If a day would come when not a single Muslim or Christian were to be left on the surface of the earth, Islam or Christianity would not cease to exist nor lose their reality in the ultimate sense.

“The radical difference between the traditionalists and most other schools of thought concerned with the study of religions comes precisely from this vast difference in the views they hold concerning the nature of reality. The traditionalists refuse to accept as valid that truncated vision of reality currently held in the Western world and arising originally from the post-medieval rationalism and empiricism that became prevalent in Europe and came to constitute the background for most of religious studies, especially in academic circles. It must be remembered, however, that the perspective held by the traditionalists is the same as the world view within which the religions themselves were born and cultivated over the millennia until the advent of the modern world. That is why the traditional studies of religion are able to penetrate into the heart of the subject in such a fashion and also why these studies, in contrast to those of most modern scholars of religion, are so deeply appreciated by the traditional authorities of different religions outside the modern Western world and its cultural extensions into other parts of the globe.”

[Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Traditionalist Approach to Religion.” The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr. William C. Chittick, editor. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc. 2007. Pages 21-27.]

“… Islam is a religion that teaches people how to understand the world and themselves. This … dimension corresponds to the mind. It has traditionally been called ‘faith,’ because its points of orientation are the objects to which faith attaches – God, the angels, the scriptures, the prophets, and so on. These are mentioned constantly in the Koran and the Hadith, and investigation of their nature and reality became the domain of various disciplines, such as Kalam, philosophy, and theoretical Sufism. Any serious attempt to investigate these objects globally cannot fail to investigate the deepest questions of human concern. The great philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and physicians of Islam, who have been studied and admired by many Western historians, were trained in this dimension of the religion. So also, the most famous of the Sufis were thoroughly grounded in the theoretical knowledge of the objects of faith.” [William C. Chittick. Sufism: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications. 2008. Page 6.]

“When the Law came, it contradicted everything proven by rational faculties. It mentioned [God’s] coming, descent, sitting, rejoicing, laughter, hand, foot, and every attribute of temporally originated things that has been transmitted in the sound traditions. Then it brought ‘There is nothing like Him’ ([Koran] 42:11), even though these attributes have been affirmed. If they were impossible, as the rational faculty indicates. He would not have ascribed them to Himself and the true report would be a lie. But God ‘sent no messenger save with the tongue of his people, that he might make clear to them’ (Koran 14:4) what He sent down to them and that they might understand. The Prophet made clear, delivered the message, and called God to witness before his community that he had delivered the message.” [William C. Chittick. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ꞌArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1989. Page 75.]

“Every sacred art is ” founded on a science of forms, or in other words, on the symbolism inherent in forms. It must be borne in mind that a symbol is not merely a conventional sign. It manifests its archetype by virtue of a definite ontological law; as [Ananda K.] Coomaraswamy has observed, a symbol is in a certain sense that to which it gives expression. For this very reason traditional symbolism is never without beauty: according to the spiritual view of the world, the beauty of an object is nothing but the transparency of its existential envelopes; an art worthy of the name is beautiful because it is true.” [Titus Burckhardt. Foundations of Oriental Art & Symbolism. Michael Oren Fitzgerald, editor. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc. 2009. Page 4.]

“The love of ‘formulae,’ that is, of formal syntheses which are both concise and rich in possibilities, is characteristic of every sacred art. Buddhist iconography is made up of type images of this kind, and the same is true of Hindu and Taoist art, as well as of the icons of the Eastern Church, whose coloring and composition are fixed by tradition. In each case the imagination of the individual artist is subordinated to the traditional model; his imagination is free only in an inward sense in that he endeavors to attain to the spiritual kernel of his model and to remake the image from that. In the case of Islam, it is in architecture and ornamentation that one must look for the formulae or prototypes which the artist ceaselessly reproduces and varies according to circumstance. These prototypes are inexhaustible because they are true.” [Titus Burckhardt. Art of Islam: Language and Meaning. Commemorative edition. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc. 2009. Page 125.]

“In what follows an attempt will be made to show the intellectual perspective of Sufism and to this end its own way of expressing things will be adopted with the addition, where this is possible, of whatever explanations are needed by a European reader. At the same time analogies will be indicated between certain ideas of Sufism and those of other traditional doctrines. To do this does not involve contradicting in any way the point of view inherent in Sufism, for Sufism has always recognized the principle according to which the Divine Revelation, transmitted by the great mediators, takes on different forms corresponding to the different aptitudes of the human groupings called on to receive them. It is well understood that comparisons between different traditions run the risk of being misunderstood; and for the most part Sufi masters have limited themselves to general indications of the universality of the traditions. In this they respected the faith of simple folk, for, if religious faith is a virtuality of knowledge (otherwise it would be merely opinion), its light is none the less enclosed in an emotional realm attached to one particular translation of transcendent Truth. As a result it tends to deny everything that relates to another inspired mode of expression. However, prudence in relation to the faith of a human grouping or collectivity is called for only so long as the sacred civilization which protects that collectivity represents a more or less impenetrable ‘world.’ Such a situation may change after an inevitable meeting of two different sacred civilizations such as the meeting of Islam and Hinduism under the Mogul emperors, and all the more does it change when the contours of the great traditional civilizations are breaking down. In the chaos in which we now live certain comparisons are inevitable, at any rate for those who are sensitive to spiritual forms, and it is no longer possible to avoid the problems to which such comparisons give rise simply by passing over them in silence.” [Titus Burckhardt. Introduction to Sufi Doctrine. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc. 2008. Pages xiv-xv.]

“Now we know that Plato, who says this, is always praising what is ancient and deprecating innovations (of which the causes are, in the strictest and worst sense of the word, aesthetic), and that he ranks the formal and canonical arts of Egypt far above the humanistic Greek art that he saw coming into fashion. The kind of art that Plato endorsed was, then, precisely what we know as Greek Geometric art. We must not think that it would have been primarily for its decorative values that Plato must have admired this kind of ‘primitive’ art, but for its truth or accuracy, because of which it has the kind of beauty that is universal and invariable, its equations being ‘akin’ to the First Principles of which the myths and mysteries, related or enacted, are imitations in other kinds of material. The forms of the simplest and severest kinds of art, the synoptic kind of art that we call ‘primitive,’ are the natural language of all traditional philosophy; and it is for this very reason that Plato’s dialectic makes continual use of figures of speech, which are really figures of thought.” [Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Rama P. Coomaraswamy, editor. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc. 2004. Page 28.]

“I have seen few things in East or West more suggestive of entire gentleness than these expressions of reverence for the teacher. I need not point out what a perfected instrument for the transmission of a living tradition such an education forms. And if, to return to the Technical School of to-day, one may make a suggestion, it would be this : that supposing the aim be to train up a generation of skilled and capable craftsmen, it were better to appoint living master craftsmen as the permanent servants of the community, endowed with an inalienable salary, or better, a house, and demand of them that they should carry out the public works undertaken by the community, and that they themselves should keep apprentices, choosing out of them one to be their successor in the position of Public Craftsman. Such a system would do more to produce skilled craftsmen, and to produce good work, than would twice the money spent on Technical Schools and on competitive design for great undertakings.” [Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. The Indian Craftsman. London: Probsthain & Co. 1909. Page 87.]

“Not one but two great nations were to look back to Abraham as their father – two great nations, that is, two guided powers, two instruments to work the Will of Heaven, for God does not promise as a blessing that which is profane, nor is there any greatness before God except greatness in the Spirit. Abraham was thus the fountain-head of two spiritual streams which must not flow together, but each in its own course; and he entrusted Hagar and Ishmael to the blessing of God and the care of His Angels in the certainty that all would be well with them.

“Two spiritual streams, two religions, two worlds for God; two circles, therefore two centres. A place is never holy through the choice of man, but because it has been chosen in Heaven. There were two holy centres within the orbit of Abraham: one of these was at hand, the other perhaps he did not yet know; and it was to the other that Hagar and Ishmael were guided, in a barren valley of Arabia, some forty camel days south of Canaan. The valley was named Becca, some say on account of its narrowness: hills surround it on all sides except for three passes, one to the north, one to the south, and one opening towards the Red Sea which is fifty miles to the west. The Books do not tell us how Hagar and her son reached Becca; perhaps some travellers took care of them, for the valley was on one of the great caravan routes, sometimes called ‘the incense route,’ because perfumes and incense and such wares were brought that way from South Arabia to the Mediterranean; and no doubt Hagar was guided to leave the caravan, once the place was reached. It was not long before both mother and son were overcome by thirst, to the point that Hagar feared Ishmael was dying. According to the traditions of their descendants, he cried out to God from where he lay in the sand, and his mother stood on a rock at the foot of a nearby eminence to see if any help was in sight. Seeing no one, she hastened to another point of vantage, but from there likewise not a soul was to be seen. Half distraught, she passed seven times in all between the two points, until at the end of her seventh course, as she sat for rest on the further rock, the Angel spoke to her.”

[Martin Lings. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International. 2006. Pages 1-2.]

“According to the Islamic perspective, which underlines the absolute supremacy of the rights of the Creator over those of the creature, artistic creativity is nothing other than a predisposition which God has placed in man to help him follow the path which leads to Him. The artist is therefore only one among others of the servants of God; he does not belong to any exceptional category. He should himself, the better to fulfill his role in the collectivity, become, by means of effacement and disinterested service, an as transparent as possible interpreter of the Tradition to which he subscribes. Whence the relationship that has always existed with Muslim artists between the practice of virtues and the excellence of professional work. The Prophet [Muḥammad] said: ‘God loves that when one of you does something, he does it thoroughly.’ And one can confirm that this advice has been followed to the letter, in particular by the artisans of the guilds and brotherhoods of the entire classical period for whom the artisanal pact was a unanimously respected professional code of honor.” [Jean-Louis Michon, “The Message of Islamic Art.” Studies in Comparative Religion. Volume 17, numbers 1 and 2, winter–spring 1985. Pagination unknown.]

“… this idea of ‘grace,’ which translates a divine function, is by no means unintelligible in the light of traditional Buddhist teachings, being in fact implicit in every known form of spirituality, the Buddhist form included. The question, however, is how to situate the said idea in a manner that implies no contradiction, since it must freely be admitted that the Buddhist wisdom has not given to the idea of grace the same form as it has received in the personalist and theistic doctrines of Semitic provenance; nor is such a thing to be expected, inasmuch as the ‘economy’ of the respective traditions rests on very different premises, thus affecting both the doctrines and the manner of their application in practice. Each kind of wisdom determines the nature of its corresponding method: Buddhism has always made of this a governing principle of spiritual life at any degree or level.” [Marco Pallis, “Is There Room for ‘Grace’ in Buddhism?” Studies in Comparative Religion. Volume 2, number 4, autumn 1968. Pagination unknown.]

“One can sense a problem brewing …, for if number is the vehicle of precision (major premise), and number is not the unit of measure in tradition (minor premise), whose basic measure is quality rather than quantity, does it not follow (conclusion) that the traditional outlook is forever and in principle condemned to vagueness? As far as descriptions of that outlook are concerned, and insofar as these descriptions are compared with scientific descriptions, the answer must be yes; the syllogism is valid. But lest it be concluded that this difference closes the books on the traditional perspective, we must register immediately that tradition’s limitations in the direction of precision carry compensations. The alternative to numbers is words. Whereas numbers are signs, words are symbols, and therefore by their very nature equivocal; their ambiguity can be reduced but never eliminated. This bars them from the needle’s eye of absolute precision, but the loose ends that prevent them from piercing that eye endow them with a texture that numbers cannot match. Multivalent, irreducibly equivocal in intimation and nuance where not actually ambiguous in dictionary definition, words reach out like a banyan root system, as tangled and in as many directions. Folding and refolding in adumbration and allusion, they weave, veer, and seek out subliminal soil. No wonder logicians flee their meanderings in favor of fixed and adamantine glyphs. The despair of logicians is the humanist’s glory. From the adversity of verbal ambiguity, opportunity opens. The multivalence of language enables it to mesh with the multidimensionality of the human spirit, depicting its higher reaches as numbers never can. Equations can be elegant, but that is a separate matter. Poems cannot be composed in numbers.

“We are now in a position to see how science is limited. The knowledge with which it is exclusively occupied is, to begin with, objective. It must be intersubjectively confirmable, and since sense data are what men most incontrovertibly agree on after the tautologies of mathematics and logic, the knowledge science seeks is that which at some level of amplification can connect with man’s senses. That which so connects is energy/matter, so energy/matter in its manifold forms and permutations is science’s object. Within its domain science looks especially for precise—which in the end means mathematically expressible—knowledge that is predictive and augments control.”

[Huston Smith. Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions. New York: HarperSanFrancisco imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. 1992. Pages 13-14.]

“In traditional times it was assumed that they [the traditions] disclosed the ultimate nature of reality. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries science began to cast doubt on that assumption; for Scriptures only assert their truths, whereas controlled experiments can prove scientific hypotheses. After three centuries of confusion on this point, however, we now see that such proofs hold only for the empirical world. The worthful aspects of reality—its values, meaning, and purpose—slip through the devices of science in the way that the sea slips through the nets of fishermen.

“Where then can we turn for counsel concerning things that matter most? Our realization that science cannot help us reopens the door to looking seriously again at what the wisdom traditions propose. Not all of their contents are enduringly wise. Modern science has superseded their cosmologies, and the social mores of their day, which they reflect—gender relations, class structures, and the like—must be reassessed in the light of changing times and the continuing struggle for justice. But if we pass a strainer through the world’s religions to lift out their conclusions about reality and how life should be lived, those conclusions begin to look like the winnowed wisdom of the human race.

“What are the specifics of that wisdom? In the realm of ethics the Decalogue pretty much tells the cross-cultural story. We should avoid murder, thieving, lying, and adultery. These are minimum guidelines … but they are not nothing, as we realize if we reflect on how much better the world would be if they were universally honored.”

[Huston Smith. The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. New York: HarperCollins e-books imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. 2009. Google Play edition.]

“Languages are geared to the worldviews that monitor them, and the sea change from the traditional to the scientistic worldview has profoundly affected the way our language works. The limitations of literalism were (as we have seen) recognized early on, but traditionally the literal meanings of scripture had a wider range of accuracy and effectiveness (that is, reached higher on the ladder of meaning) then than they do now: the virgin birth and empty tomb could be accepted at face value with no questions asked. And to the extent that we can do that today we are fortunate, for it shows that we haven’t fallen into modernity’s trap and made the everyday world our language’s primary referent. But not many people today are this fortunate, and the following paragraphs are intended to help them cope with the difficulty that they have taking claims such as the two just cited—the virgin birth and the empty tomb—literally.” [Huston Smith. The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. New York: HarperCollins e-books imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. 2009. Google Play edition.]

“The first thing to be emphasised concerning the world of Tradition is that it is founded upon a union or effective link between divine reality and the human, and between spirit and matter. This unity is not affected by the divergence – unique to the modern world – between sacred and profane. According to Tradition, participation in the realm of the holy represents the foundation of all life, personal as well as collective, expressed through a constant drive towards what lies above. Nature itself, with its rhythms and laws, is here envisaged as the visible manifestation of a higher rhythm and order. No real separation exists between Heaven and Earth, God and man: only a degree of ‘similarity’ whereby the former is reflected in the latter. According to traditional doctrine, the phenomena and forces of Nature are to be perceived as the expression of a higher reality, as symbols that can explain non-human knowledge. Given this premise, it can be argued that traditional man, unlike modern man, possesses a symbolic and spiritual rather than elementary perception of Nature. Understanding of the symbols of Nature provides a support for those who wish to embark on the journey upwards.” [Raido. A Handbook of Traditional Living. S. K., translator. John B. Morgan, editor. Northumberland, England: Arktos Media Ltd. 2010. Pages 3-4.]

“Gospel According to the Klan presents the official worldview of the 1920s Klan. Leaders and members alike shared and negotiated the Klan’s Protestantism and nationalism, and religion is a part of the social system that provides a set of scripts for its adherents. Stepping into the worldview of the Klan illuminates what such scripts are and how they function for the order’s members in their actions, beliefs, and lives. Klan print introduces those scripts in an ideal fashion that favors leaders’ and editors’ opinions and neglects any form of dissent. The official portrait demonstrates the complicated boundaries between the sacred and profane in lives of Klansmen and Klanswomen. Klan studies have explored much of the profane, and a small bit of the sacred, but they have not approached how both are interwoven in the lives of Klan members. Scholarly reticence about how the sacred and profane interact hides the sacred aspects of Klan life.

“To settle into the Klan worldview, I employ ethnographic methods to document, describe, and interpret. According to James Clifford, ethnography has the ability to make the ordinary strange and the strange familiar. Ethnography highlights the need for reflexivity and sensitivity to one’s subjects. In the current ethnographic turn, ethnographers reach beyond a scientific model of studying subjects through a ‘microscope’ and embrace a more dialogical model, which allows the subject to speak for him- or herself.”

[Kelly J. Baker. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. 2011. Kindle edition.]

“[Steve] Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-twentieth-century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often referred to as ‘Traditionalism’ (capital ‘T’), a form of antimodernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a ‘primordial’ Traditionalist, a believer in the idea that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, वेदांत, Vedāṃta, ‘end of the Vedas’], Sufism [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, تَصَوُّف, Taṣawwuf], and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to ‘restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.’

“Guénon, like Bannon, was drawn to a sweeping, apocalyptic view of history that identified two events as marking the beginning of the spiritual decline of the West: the destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar in 1314 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Also like Bannon, Guénon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time and believed that the West was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali Yuga [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, कलियुग, kaliyuga, ‘age of the black one’], a six-thousand-year ‘dark age’ when tradition is wholly forgotten.

“The antimodernist tenor of Guénon’s philosophy drew several notable followers who made attempts during the twentieth century to re-enchant the world by bringing about this restoration. The most notorious of these was Julius Evola, an Italian intellectual and the black sheep of the Traditionalist family. A monarchist and racial theorist who traced the descent of the Kali Yuga to interwar European politics, Evola, unlike Guénon (a pious Muslim chiefly interested in spiritual transformation), took concrete steps to incite societal transformation. By 1938, he had struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini, and his ideas became the basis of Fascist racial theory; later, after he soured on Mussolini, Evola’s ideas gained currency in Nazi Germany.…

“Bannon, more synthesist than adherent, brought to Guénon’s Traditionalism a strong dose of Catholic social thought, in particular the concept of ‘subsidiarity’: the principle expressed in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical … that political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small-government conservatism.

“Everywhere Bannon looked in the modern world, he saw signs of collapse and an encroaching globalist order stamping out the last vestiges of the traditional. He saw it in governmental organizations such as the European Union and political leaders such as German chancellor Angela Merkel, who insisted that countries forfeit their sovereignty, and thus their ability to maintain their national character, to distant secular bureaucrats bent on erasing national borders.”

[Joshua Green. Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. New York: Penguin Press imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. 2017. Pages 117-118.]

“Set off by themselves in their remote corner of the planet, the Australians have the distinction of belonging to the white race. They live like nabobs in that vast, empty land, assured of the limitless wealth of their mines and their flocks. One thing they do quite well is read maps. The armada, when it left the mouth of the Ganges, appeared to head south. To the south lies Indonesia. Skirt it as far as the Straits of Timor, and suddenly, there’s Australia—precisely the route the Japanese were taking through the Pacific in World War II, before they were stopped just in time at the straits. Meeting in Canberra, as it did every Tuesday, for supposedly ‘routine deliberations’—a prosperous and vulnerable nation knows how to conceal its panic—the government published a communiqué, which, though buried in a mass of other texts, didn’t pass unnoticed. ‘The Australian government,’ it stated, ‘considers it necessary to call attention to the fact that entry of all foreign nationals into the country is subject to the provisions of the Immigration Act, and that under no circumstances will these provisions be abated or rescinded.’ Plain and simple. Now, when you consider the model severity of the Australian Immigration Act, encouraging, as it does, the entry of Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, English, French—in short, all those white of skin and Christian of soul, while relentlessly excluding any trace of yellow, black, or brown—you will understand that, for the Australians, champions of the Western World stuck away in the farfiung hinterlands of Asia, this reminder was intended to rally public sentiment. It encouraged the Australians, in rather veiled terms, to steel themselves against undue compassion, and served notice on the Ganges fleet to keep its distance.” [Jean Raspail. The Camp of the Saints. Petoskey, Michigan: Social Contract Press. 1994. Ebook edition.]

“A … possibility is that [Donald J.] Trump represents a tendency towards ‘neo-Bonapartism’: a form of rule that substitutes a charismatic leader for a coherent hegemonic project. Like the original nineteenth-century version, this latter-day Bonapartism is linked to a crisis of hegemony, ultimately stemming from the erosion of the material base that allows the American capitalist class to pursue its own interests while claiming to represent those of society in general. Unlike its prototype, however, the new version of Bonapartism is not connected to a mass mobilization from below, and cannot be understood as a reaction to a threat to the order of property.” [Dylan Riley, “American Brumaire.” New Left Review. Series II, number 103, January–February 2017. Pages 21-32.]

“I just thank God for Democracy Now! because journalism is almost dead as we move into this neofascist age. And thank god you all are still willing to tell the truth.…

“… in an emerging neofascist moment, you have the rule of big business, which is big banks and big corporations. You scapegoat the most vulnerable. It could be Muslims, Mexicans, gay brothers, lesbian sisters, indigenous peoples, black peoples, jews, and so on. And then you also have militaristic orientations around the world. And so, you see the extension of the repressive apparatus, as those of us who hit the streets, those of us who will be — are willing to go to jail, we’ve had to recognize we’ll have more coming at us under [the Donald] Trump administration. But, the crucial thing is, is that he had talked about his connection with working people. And it’s clear that the one percent are still running things.…

“What neofascist — it’s an American style form of fascism. What I mean by that is we’ve had neoliberal rule from Carter to Obama. That neoliberal rule left in place a national security state. It left in place massive surveillance. It left in place the ability of the president to kill an American citizen with no due process. That’s Obama. That was the culmination of the neoliberal era. Now you get someone who is narcissistic — which is to say out of control psychologically — who is ideologically confused — which is to say, in over his head — and who does he choose? The most right wing reactionary zealots which lead toward the arbitrary deployment of law, which is what neofascism is, but to reinforce corporate interests, big bank interest, and to keep track of those of us who are cast as peoples of color, women, jews, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, and so forth, and so — So, this is one of the most frightening moments in the history of this very fragile empire and fragile republic.…

“… you drop bombs on innocent children with U.S. drones and then wonder why the gangsters, the fascists coming out of the Muslim world, are organizing. And of course, we’ve got to be anti-fascist across the board. But this is going to be the most trying of times in our lifetime. There’s no doubt about it. And at 63 years old, I am thoroughly fortified for this fight. I will tell you that.…

“… And we said before the election that Trump would be a neofascist catastrophe. And it’s very clear from his picks that he is moving in that direction.”

[Cornel West, “Cornel West on Donald Trump: This is What Neo-Fascism Looks Like.” Democracy Now. December 1st, 2016.]

“There are multiple cultural studies projects, including: the … neo-pragmatic marxism of Cornel West ….” [Norman K. Denzin, “From American sociology to cultural studies.” Cultural Studies. Volume 2, number 1, 1999. Pages 117-136.]

“My own kind of pragmatism – what I call prophetic pragmatism – is closely akin to the philosophy of praxis put forward by Antonio Gramsci. The major difference is that my attitude toward Marxism as a grand theory is heuristic rather than dogmatic. Furthermore, my focus on the theoretical development in emerging forms of oppositional thought – feminist theory, antiracist theory, gay and lesbian theory – leads me to posit or look for not an overarching synthesis but rather an articulated assemblage of analytical outlooks, to further more morally principled and politically effective forms of action to ameliorate the plight of the wretched of the earth.

“On the philosophical level, this means adopting the moderate pragmatic views of John Dewey. Epistemic antifoundationalism and minimalist ontological realism (in its pluralist version) proceed from taking seriously the impact of modern historical and rhetorical consciousness on truth and knowledge. ‘Anything goes’ relativism and disenabling forms of skepticism fall by the wayside, serving only as noteworthy reminders to avoid dogmatic traps and to accept intellectual humility rather than as substantive philosophical positions.”

[Cornel West. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 114-115.]

“… what is … ‘pragmatism at its best’? What form does it take? What are its constitutive features or fundamental components? These questions bring me to my third point – the idea of a prophetic pragmatist perspective and praxis. I use the adjective ‘prophetic’ in order to harken back to the rich, though flawed, traditions of Judaism and Christianity that promote courageous resistance against, and relentless critiques of, injustice and social misery. These traditions are rich in that they help keep alive collective memories of moral (i.e., anti-idolatrous) struggle and nonmarket values (i.e., love for others, loyalty to an ethical ideal, and social freedom) in a more and more historically amnesiac society and market-saturated culture. These traditions are flawed because they tend toward dogmatic pronouncements (i.e., ‘Thus said the Lord’) to homogeneous constituencies. Prophetic pragmatism gives courageous resistance and relentless critique a self-critical character and democratic content; that is, it analyzes the social causes of unnecessary forms of social misery, promotes moral outrage against them, organizes different constituencies to alleviate them, yet does so with an openness to its own blindnesses and shortcomings.

“Prophetic pragmatism is pragmatism at its best because it promotes a critical temper and democratic faith without making criticism a fetish or democracy an idol.”

[Cornel West, “The Limits of Neopragmatism.” Southern California Law Review. Volume 63, number 6, September 1990. Pages 1747-1751.]

“Prophesy Deliverance! is … a call for dialogue—not simply between Christians and Marxists—but more fundamentally in the face of all forms of dogmatism, including those of Christians and Marxists. In fact, my self-styled allegiance to American pragmatism and American jazz is first and foremost a commitment to polyphonic inquiry and improvisational conversation. For me, prophetic Christianity is a deep suspicion of any form of idolatry—of any human effort to evade or deny the contingency and fragility of any human construct (including religious ones). Modern attempts to ossify, petrify, or freeze human creations of method, technique, rationality, sexuality, nationality, race, or empire are suspect. The best of progressive Marxism simply reveals the operations of power and forms of subordination beneath such idolatries (including Marxist ones).” [Cornel West. Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press. 2002. Page xii.]

“The tradition of pragmatism—the most influential stream in American thought—is in need of an explicit political mode of cultural criticism that refines and revises [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s concerns with power, provocation, and personality in light of [John] Dewey’s stress on historical consciousness and [W. E. B.] Du Bois’ focus on the plight of the wretched of the earth. This political mode of cultural criticism must recapture Emerson’s sense of vision—his Utopian impulse—yet rechannel it through Dewey’s conception of creative democracy and Du Bois’ social structural analysis of the limits of capitalist democracy. Furthermore, this new kind of cultural criticism—we can call it prophetic pragmatism —must confront candidly the tragic sense found in [Sidney] Hook and [Lionel] Trilling, the religious version of the Jamesian strenuous mood in [Reinhold] Niebuhr, and the tortuous grappling with the vocation of the intellectual in [C. Wright] Mills. Prophetic pragmatism, with its roots in the American heritage and its hopes for the wretched of the earth, constitutes the best chance of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action.” [Cornel West. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. 1989. Page 204.]

“The fundamental motivation for this book is to resurrect Black prophetic fire in our day—especially among the younger generation. I want to reinvigorate the Black prophetic tradition and to keep alive the memory of Black prophetic figures and movements. I consider the Black prophetic tradition one of the greatest treasures in the modern world. It has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf. Without the Black prophetic tradition, much of the best of America would be lost and some of the best of the modern world would be forgotten.

“All the great figures in this book courageously raised their voices in order to bear witness to people’s suffering. These Black prophetic figures are connected to collective efforts to overcome injustice and make the world a better place for everyone. Even as distinct individuals, they are driven by a we-consciousness that is concerned with the needs of others. More importantly, they are willing to renounce petty pleasures and accept awesome burdens. Tremendous sacrifice and painful loneliness sit at the center of who they are and what they do.”

[Cornel West. Black Prophetic Fire. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. 2014. Page 2.]

“I came to pragmatism a little later [after discovering philosophy]. As an undergraduate, it was [Jean-Paul] Sartre who had a strong influence on me.…

“… [Richard] Rorty had a tremendous impact on me once I went to Princeton. I didn’t seriously encounter the pragmatic tradition until I went to Princeton.… But I never became a philosopher, professionally speaking. I’ve never taught in a philosophy department. I went straight from graduate school in philosophy to teaching at the Union Theological Seminary (for eight years) and then the Yale Divinity School (for another three).

“… There is something distinctively American about pragmatism. There’s no doubt about that. But there are a number of things going on in my book [The American Evasion of Philosophy]. One is that my motivations were thoroughly Gramscian. That is to say, I wanted to try and understand the historical specificity of the development of American civilization through a particular philosophical discourse.”

[Cornel West, “American radicalism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 71, May/June 1995. Pages 27-38.]

“[Cornel] West calls ‘prophetic pragmatism’ the theoretical vehicle through which such practical chances can be defined and actualized. It represents a synthesis of West’s intellectual andsocial concerns andof fers a weapon against both cynical realism andfallacious foundationalism: ‘Critical temper as a way of struggle and democratic faith as a way of life are the twin pillars of prophetic pragmatism. The major foes to be contested are despair, dogmatism and oppression’ …. West’s prophetic pragmatism is based on faith in democratic praxis as it is carried out by ‘ordinary people,’ on the possibilities of articulating and actualizing social visions groundedin moral principles, and on three dimensions of thought and action.” [Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Of Hope and Faith and Love: Rhetorical Coherence in Cornel West’s Politics of Convergence.” Qualitative Inquiry. Volume 8, number 4, 2002. Pages 448-462.]

“… school leaders in our urban centers may wish to ground their work in what Cornel West … calls ‘prophetic pragmatism.’ Prophetic pragmatism is a form of thinking and seeing the world centered on democratic practices. It is an intellectual process built on the premise of existential democracy and requires one to be self-critical and self-corrective as well. Notions of existential democracy emanate from the thinking of John Dewey …, who believed that democracy as compared with other ways of life is the only way of living that uses the power of experience as both an end and means.” [Michael E. Dantley, “African American Spirituality and Cornel West’s Notions of Prophetic Pragmatism: Restructuring Educational Leadership in American Urban Schools.” Educational Administration Quarterly. Volume 41, number 4, October 2005. Pages 651-674.]

“Prophetic pragmatism, Cornel West’s brand of pragmatism, is best described in the preface of Prophesy Deliverance! as ‘an Afro-American philosophy that is essentially a specific expression of contemporary American philosophy which takes seriously the Afro-American experience.’ Taking the African-American experience seriously, however, does not require one to get rid of useful theories formulated by non-Black thinkers. Philosophical culinary puns aside, West has always attempted to fuse African-American sensibilities and European forms; perhaps one could say that West tries to convert ‘Frankfurters and French fries’ into ‘soul food.’” [Brad Elliott Stone, “Prophetic Pragmatism and the Practices of Freedom: On Cornel West’s Foucauldian Methodology.” Foucault Studies. Number 11, February 2011. Pages 92-105.]

“Fundamentally he [Cornel West] was a liberationist critic, but to the extent that he hung his reputation on familiar academic categories he did so as a religious/philosophical proponent of ‘prophetic pragmatism.’ … In the U.S. American context, he contended, the best resources for this project were the pragmatist, Marxist, and Christian intellectual traditions. West prized pragmatism as the distinctive American contribution to Western philosophy; more importantly, it underwrote historicist social criticism pressing toward social transformation.” [Gary Dorrien, “Imagining Social Justice: Cornel West’s Prophetic Public Intellectualism.” CrossCurrents. Volume 58, number 1, Spring 2008. Pages 6-42.]

“I conceive of the work that follows as visionary pragmatism. One important way to think of visionary pragmatism is as an energetic refusal of how these two words have so often been opposed to each other, by people on more than one side of more than one antagonism. Visionary pragmatists seek the resonance and dissonance of this pairing, even as others generate contradictory frames to secure various borders of theory and politics.…

“… visionary pragmatism is pragmatic insofar as it relentlessly thinks, works, and acts on the limits of the present, drawing forth and engendering new resonances, receptivities, relationships, movements, circulations, dynamics, practices, powers, institutions, strategies, shocks, and so forth, in an effort to contribute to desirable changes in our lived worlds. Yet it is visionary in the sense that it maintains an intransigent practice of peering underneath, above, around, through, and beyond the cracks in the destructive walls and mainstream ruts of this world. It lingers in eddies, catches crosscurrents, and cultivates new flows that spill through these cracks and flood beyond the banks. It has an unquenchable appetite for visions that come from beyond hegemonic common sense or exceed it from within, and it devotes itself to looking for clues of these, listening to whispers near and far that articulate suggestive possibilities beyond the assumed boundaries, and seeking modes of political engagement that help inspire, energize, inform, and enact them.”

[Romand Coles. Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2016. Pages 17-18.]

“… we … [can] co-creatively develop new ways of thinking with diverse people that are both visionary and pragmatic, rather than either myopically pragmatic or so ethereally disconnected from the world as to preclude all possibility of meaningful return. We would cultivate relationships, purposes, and transformative agency in relation to the suffering and possibilities of people, places, and the planet. In so doing, we would likely regenerate powerful, reflective, imaginative, and durable support from broader publics—precisely because we have engaged in becoming public and catalyzing publics and publicness with them. They would likely support higher education, then, not as a provider of services, but as an institution with which they are actively implicated in relationships of reciprocity that are complex, plural, dynamic, full of tensions, and creating paths that lead beyond pervasive patterns of devastation. These sorts of publics would likely rally powerfully to defend higher education as a good in common, and they would be a formidable force against efforts to privatize, instrumentalize, or annihilate this and other forms of democracy and commonwealth.” [Romand Coles, “Transforming the Game: Democratizing the Publicness of Higher Education and Commonwealth in Neoliberal Times.” New Political Science. Volume 36, number 4, December 2014. Pages 622-639.]

“… the sharp distinction between natural and supernatural originated in a nominalist rejection of Scholasticism that aimed to assert the radical sovereignty of God beyond all entanglements with the world, as instrumentality and secular time increasingly came to govern this world ….

“… [There is] the current course of things—in which Constantinian Christianity (transcendence) and neo-Constantinian democracy (immanence) are collaborating in ways that are propelling the world toward certain hell. Yet there is the possibility of a ladder—or ladders—that might ascend in better directions if the traditions of radical ecclesia and radical democracy each dispossess themselves of the idea that they must be the sole author of each and every rung. This is not an easy or a comfortable ladder to climb. For beneath every rung there is a long way to fall and a tragic history of falling. To be sure, reliance on a ladder, some of whose rungs have been built significantly by others, is dangerous.”

[Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, “‘Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet’: Reflections on A Secular Age.” Modern Theology. Volume 26, number 3, July 2010. Pages 349-362.]

“There are a number of very good reasons why psychologists should be interested in language. Language is so central to all social activities it is easy to take for granted. Its very familiarity sometimes makes it transparent to us. Yet imagine conveying a complex idea such as ‘meet me Thursday in my room for a discussion of semiology’ without language. It is not easy to see how it could be done.

“Communication of this kind which involves abstract notions, actions and events removed in time and space, delicate shades of meaning, and logical distinctions depends on people sharing a complex symbolic representational system. Moreover, language is not just a code for communication. It is inseparably involved with processes of thinking and reasoning. Just as it is difficult to imagine sophisticated communication without language, it is hard to see how complex abstract reasoning could be performed by people without a language.

“The study of language is particularly vital to social psychology because it is simply the most basic and pervasive form of interaction between people.”

[Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. Beverly Hills, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1987. Page 9.]

“DP [discursive psychology] is a perspective that starts with the psychological phenomena as things that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. Its focus is on the ways descriptions can implicate psychological matters, on the ways psychological states are displayed in talk, and on the way people are responded to as upset, devious, knowledgeable or whatever. It thus starts with a view of psychology that is fundamentally social, relational and interactional. It is not just psychology as it appears in interaction; rather, it understands much of our psychological language, and broader ‘mental practices,’ as organized for action and interaction. It is a specifically discursive psychology because discourse – talk and texts – is the primary medium for social action.” [Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn, “Discursive Psychology: Mind and Reality in Practice.” Language, discourse and social psychology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press. 2007. Pages 160-181.]

“Discursive psychology begins with psychology as it faces people living their lives. It studies how psychology is constructed, understood and displayed as people interact in everyday and more institutional situations. How does a speaker show that they are not prejudiced, while developing a damning version of an entire ethnic group? How are actions coordinated in a counselling session to manage the blame of the different parties for the relationship breakdown? How is upset displayed, understood and receipted in a call to a child protection helpline? Questions of this kind require us to understand the kinds of things that are ‘psychological’ for people as they act and interact in particular settings – families, workplaces and schools. And this in turn encourages us to respecify the very object psychology.” [Sally Wiggins and Jonathan Potter, “Discursive Psychology.” The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology. Carla Willig and Wendy Stainton-Rogers, editors. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2008. Pages 73-90.]

“Discourse and Social Psychology offered a complete approach to social psychological matters. It took the chapter headings of the textbooks of the time – attitudes, categories and so on – and developed alternative analyses that often completely rebuilt the original notions. The aim of this paper is to offer something of an audit of the coherence and success of one major strand of discursive psychology after more than a quarter of a century. A full description of the different strands of this work is beyond the scope of this paper, let alone a full evaluation. Part of the problem here is that discourse work has been evolving with different emphases and as parts of different debates over this quarter century, and the different critical responses have a range of specific targets. Inevitably this audit of arguments and issues will engage in considerable simplification.” [Jonathan Potter, “Rereading Discourse and Social Psychology: Transforming social psychology?” British Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 51, number 3, September 2012. Pages 436-455.]

“Discursive psychology applies the theory and methods of discourse analysis to psychological topics. The kind of discourse analysis that is used here derives from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, linguistic philosophy, rhetoric and the sociology of knowledge …. It has been applied mostly to how versions of reality and cognition are assembled in discourse of any kind, ranging from formal scientific papers to everyday conversations. This concern with cognition and reality has taken the form of critiques and reformulations, as kinds of discourse practices, of various standard psychological topics, including attitudes, memory, the self, causal attribution, script theory, personality traits, categorization, prejudice and cognitive development.” [Derek Edwards, “Emotion Discourse.” Culture & Psychology. Volume 5, number 3, 1999. Pages 271-291.]

“In celebration of 25 years of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG) in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University [Loughborough, England], this special issue is an invitation to reflect critically on original and innovative ways of doing social psychology. It brings together the key voices, themes, arguments, contributions, and contributors that have shaped the emergence of, and the debate around, what is now called Discursive Psychology (DP). This special issue of the British Journal of Social Psychology focuses on the ‘Loughborough school’ of social psychology, where preoccupations with discourse and social psychology emerged as a dynamic, new enterprise in social psychology in the 1980s and early 1990s.” [Martha Augoustinos and Cristian Tileagǎ, “Twenty five years of discursive psychology.” British Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 51, number 3, September 2012. Pages 405-412.]

“Discursive psychology can be thought of as both a theoretical orientation to the study of language and a methodological approach, wherein the analyst begins with discourse in that discourse is assumed to be the medium of human action …. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, discursive psychology is focused on naturalistic studies and engages in the analysis of audio and video recordings of people interacting in their everyday and institutional contexts.… First, discourse is positioned as action-oriented …. Second, discourse is understood as constructed by the words or conversational devices employed within a given interaction.… Third, the discourse is presumed to be situated within a given interaction.” [Jessica Nina Lester, “Discursive Psychology: Methodology and Applications.” Qualitative Psychology. Volume 1, number 2, August 2014. Pages 141-143.]

“This critical appraisal begins with a report of the beginnings of my academic life and how it was shaped by the ideas and debates that developed into discursive psychology (DP). My experience points to how limited the social psychology of 25 years ago was and the significance of DP in expanding the disciplinary boundaries. For me, part of the attraction and excitement of ‘the turn to language’ was its confluences with the critical project of feminism. At one point, discourse analysis in psychology was viewed as virtually synonymous with critical or feminist research ….” [Ann Weatherall, “Discursive psychology and feminism.” British Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 51, number 3, September 2012. Pages 463-470.]

“… [There is] the influential concept of tellability, which is at the core of narrative analysis, and at times being equated with narrativity. Tellability captures the aesthetic, affective, and subjective aspects of narrative; the dynamics of experientiality ….

“… my contention is that the turn to narratives-in-interaction has to be methodologically grounded and analytically associated with the following three paradigm shifts with increasing purchase within discourse studies: a) new theories of genre, b) a view of identities-ininteraction and c) a late modern celebration of the micro-, that is, of small, unofficial, fragmented and/or non-hegemonic social practices.…

“… paradigm shifts can provide an overarching theoretical coherence to a systematic turn to narratives-in-interaction at the same time as affording opportunities for much needed inter-disciplinarities for the future of narrative analysis.”

[Alexandra Georgakopoulou, “The other side of the story: towards a narrative analysis of narratives-in-interaction.” Discourse Studies. Volume 8, number 2, 2006. Pages 335-357.]

“In this article, I utilize a multicultural feminist critical narrative inquiry to forefront co-researchers’ processes of engaging conversations with family members that they identified as being able to support their spiritual practices. I utilize narrative inquiry methods and co-researcher methods to highlight how children’s literacies and spiritual practices are engaged by conversations with family members. These include narrative interviews, focus groups, collaborative conversations, participant observation, and children-co-researcher interviews.” [Nadjwa E. L. Norton, “Talking Spirituality with Family Members: Black and Latina/o Children Co-researcher Methodologies.” The Urban Review. Volume 38, number 4, November 2006. Pages 313-334.]

“During a year-long multicultural feminist critical narrative study, I created storytelling spaces for those who have been silenced, including Latinas/Latinos, Blacks, and children, in order to include their voices in the theorizing that occurs about the practices that inevitably impact their lives. I situated storytelling as a political practice that served to create more equitable societies and educational institutions …. Together, the participants and I engaged in critical reflection about how identities and power manifest themselves within teacher–student relationships and knowledge processes …. Our reflections focused on how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, ability, and spirituality impact how and when one sees and challenges (in)equities ….” [Nadjwa Effat Laila Norton, “Permitanme Hablar: Allow Me to Speak.” Language Arts. Volume 83, number 2, November 2005. Pages 118-127.]

“This research was designed as a multicultural feminist critical narrative inquiry that engaged participants in multiple methods of data collection over a 1-year period. The study focused data collection and analysis on the social, political, and cultural texts that were evidenced through hip-hop. This project also analyzed what knowledges were evidenced through hip-hop, by whom, in what manner, when, and for what purposes. Within this framework, Black and Latina/Latino children were viewed as agents, producers of knowledges, storytellers, and engagers of social justice who make statements about inequities, culture, and education.” [Nadjwa E. L. Norton, “Young Children Manifest Spiritualities in Their Hip-Hop Writing.” Education and Urban Society. Volume 46, number 3, 2014. Pages 329-351.]

“The data used in this paper are drawn from a broader study employing critical discourse analysis and critical narrative inquiry to examine the contemporary socio-political reconfiguration of retirement. Drawing upon Foucauldian-informed governmental theory, retirement is drawn upon as a terrain of study to examine the re-configuration of occupational possibilities for ageing individuals.…

“The aim of critical narrative work is not to seek generalisable understandings of linkages between discourses and narratives, but to gain insight into what is possible and intelligible in a specific context and to stimulate dialogue and action related to social change.”

[Debbie Laliberte Rudman, “Situating occupation in social relations of power: Occupational possibilities, ageism and the retirement ‘choice.’” South African Journal of Occupational Therapy. Volume 45, number 1, April 2015. Pages 27-33.]

“Critical narrative analysis best describes the process of knowing upon which this research was based. An assumption underlying this approach is that the contextual dimensions of children’s experiences are valued and are inseparable from the way in which children strive to bring a sense of coherence into their lives. Thus, by listening to the stories children tell, this research sought to give voice to individual experiences and meanings, but to place them in a broader context and thereby examine the social and political connectedness of those experiences.” [Helene Anne Berman. Growing up amid violence: A critical narrative analysis of children of war and children of battered women. Ph.D. dissertation. Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan. 1996. Page 31.]

“Critical narrative research (CNR) is an emerging genre that draws on a variety of theoretical traditions and combines sets of criteria for evaluating its validity (i.e., social constructivist, artistic and critical change criteria). As such, CNR frequently border-crosses a variety of theoretical orientations that are postcolonial and poststructuralist in nature. Much of the content of a critical narrative inquiry ‘draws from critical theories, in that they embody a critique of prevailing structures and relationships of power and inequity in a relational context.’ The ‘criticalness’ of narrative research must be elucidated to distinguish the methodology from the mere telling of stories. The term ‘critical’ is used to describe ‘culture, language and participation as issues of power in need of critique with the intent of emendation or alteration in the direction of social justice and participatory democracy’ and has been added to narrative research iorder ‘to signify this explicitly political project.‘” [Luigi Iannacci, “Critical Narrative Research (CNR): Conceptualizing and Furthering the Validity of an Emerging Methodology.” Vitae Scholasticae. Volume 24, 2007. Pages 55-76.]

“Narrative inquiry focuses on the study of stories as deliberately and purposefully told, constituted of past experiences, and simultaneously ‘connected to the flow of power in the widerworld.’ Narratives are thus embedded within historical, structural, and ideological contexts, social discourses, and power relations. Through their narratives, storytellers locate themselves within the conditions that influence their choices and actions as social agents.” [Nicole Y. Pitre, Kaysi E. Kushner, Kim D. Raine, Kathy M. Hegadoren, “Critical Feminist Narrative Inquiry: Advancing Knowledge Through Double-Hermeneutic Narrative Analysis.” Advances in Nursing Science. Volume 36, number 2, June 2013. Pages 118-132.]

“Narrative inquiry is one of the many kinds of research that are part of the research approaches that have been gathered under the umbrella of qualitative research. I have advocated the importance of identifying two types of narrative inquiry. Both share the general principles of qualitative research such as working with data in the form of natural language and the use of non computational analytic procedures. Although both types of narrative inquiry are concerned with stories, they have significant differences. The paradigmatic type collects storied accounts for its data; the narrative type collects descriptions of events, happenings, and actions. The paradigmatic type uses an analytic process that identifies aspects of the data as instances of categories; the narrative type uses an analytic process that produces storied accounts. The paradigmatic type is based on what [Jerome] Bruner has termed paradigmatic reasoning; the narrative type is based in narrative reasoning. Narrative inquiry of the paradigmatic type produces knowledge of concepts; the narrative type produces knowledge of particular situations. Both types of narrative inquiry can make important contributions to the body of social science knowledge.” [Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Volume 8, issue 1, 1995. Pages 5-23.]

“… the identity stories gathered as data for narrative research are not mirror reflections of people’s experientially functioning identity stories. The gap between the publicly presented story and the lived identity story requires that researchers infer from their collected told stories the actual operating stories (or story fragments) that inform the lives of their subjects.” [Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Explorations of Narrative Identity.” Psychological Inquiry. Volume 7, number 4, 1996. Pages 363-367.]

“To learn about the impact of long-term unemployment on the career management behaviors of participating mid-career managers, I conducted a narrative inquiry. After gathering the managers’ stories about their experiences I analyzed the content, looking for information about the managers’ pursuit of re-employment, as well as for any characteristics that reflected resilient behavior and any changes in their approach to career management. The findings contributed to the subject of managerial careers in several areas including research, practice, theory and education.” [Ann Marie Gagnon. Resilient Career Narratives: An Analysis of Mid-Career Managers’ Long-Term Unemployment Narratives. Ph.D. dissertation. George Washington University. Washington, D.C. May, 2010. Page 6.]

“Let me quickly and lightly characterize the two modes so that I may get on more precisely with the matter. One mode, the paradigmatic or logico-scientific one, attempts to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. It employs categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established, lished, instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system. Its armamentarium of connectives includes on the formal side such ideas as conjunction and disjunction, hyperonymy and hyponymy, ponymy, strict implication, and the devices by which general propositions tions are extracted from statements in their particular contexts.…

“The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. Joyce thought of the particularities of the story as epiphanies of the ordinary. The paradigmatic mode, by contrast, seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction, and in the end disclaims in principle any explanatory value at all where the particular is concerned. cerned. There is a heartlessness to logic: one goes where one’s premises and conclusions and observations take one, give or take some of the blindnesses that even logicians are prone to.”

[Jerome S. Bruner. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1986. Kindle edition.]

“… I want to make explicit that my whole argument has implicitly been about the ethics of research into stories, or as I prefer to say, the moral auspices of such research. Qualitative methodologists agree that the ethical issue is not simply attaining the respondent’s consent to have his or her story recorded and analyzed.… Narrative analysis entails extensive ethical obligations. The researcher who solicits people’s stories does not simply collect data but assents to enter into a relationship with the respondent and become part of that person’s on-going struggle (‘la lotta continua’) toward a moral life. As I suggested earlier, that struggle is about narratability and legibility.” [Arthur W. Frank, “Why Study People’s Stories? The Dialogical Ethics of Narrative Analysis.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Volume 1, number 1, 2002. Pages 109-117.]

“Researchers using a holistic-content approach to narrative analysis create an account that exhibits the connections between the parts of an individual’s story that provides an explanation for the story outcome.” [Claudia C. Beal, “Keeping the story together: a holistic approach to narrative analysis.” Journal of Research in Nursing. Volume 18, number 8, 2013. Pages 692-704.]

“This article explores narrative analysis as a means of examining this charged relationship between structural stability and contextual change in the production of gender ideologies. My proposition may seem unlikely considering the representation of narrative analysis in feminist discussions of method.” [Venla Oikkonen, “Narrative analysis as a feminist method: The case of genetic ancestry tests.” European Journal of Women’s Studies. Volume 20, number 3, 2013. Pages 295-308.]

“… the field of narrative analysis is extremely broad. There are numerous types of analysis in a variety of disciplines, and the researcher must of needs limit him/herself to a relatively circumscribed definition of what a narrative is and what narrative analysis is.” [Connie J. Boudens, “The Story of Work: A Narrative Analysis of Workplace Emotion.” Organization Studies. Volume 26, number 9, 2005. Pages 1285-1306.]

“With the surge of self-narrative inquiry in social sciences, a number of approaches have been developed and applied in qualitative education research. Similar to narrative research, self-narrative ‘is an umbrella term that covers a large and diverse range of approaches’ …. We want to underscore the diversity within self-narrative inquiry, especially the various connotations of ‘self’ and the extent of researchers’ involvement in shaping the stories of ‘self.’” [Yanyue Yuan and Richard Hickman, “‘Autopsychography’ as a Form of Self-Narrative Inquiry.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. OnlineFirst edition. August, 2016. Pages 1-17.]

“The aim of the methodological design in this research was to construct a study that would reveal the rich and diverse ways that social workers use reflection. The foundation methodological argument was for constructivist ontology as orientations to the ways people understand their world, interpretivist epistemology to explore the ways that people construct meaning of these experiences and narrative inquiry and critical reflection to guide the research methods.” [Helen Hickson, “Becoming a critical narrativist: Using critical reflection and narrative inquiry as research methodology.” Qualitative Social Work. Volume 15, number 6, 2016. Pages 380-391.]

“Narrative-photovoice draws on constituencies of photovoice and photo-narratives, but is explicitly underpinned by narrative inquiry theory. As with photovoice, the objective of narrative-photovoice is to give voice to the voice-less and minority voice, but does so through narrative. Therefore, the participants reveal what is displayed in their photographs in the form of narrative. This research can take place individually and collectively.” [Shan Simmonds, Cornelia Roux, and Ina ter Avest, “Blurring the Boundaries Between Photovoice and Narrative Inquiry: A Narrative-Photovoice Methodology for Gender-Based Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Volume 14, number 3, 2015. Pages 33-49.]

“An embodied narrative inquiry attends to story realms – the performances and recounting. It is based on connection: connection between the narrator and his/her story; and connection to the audience, the listener(s). These two levels of connection are central to understanding embodied narrative.” [Liora Bresler, “Embodied Narrative Inquiry: A Methodology of Connection.” Research Studies in Music Education. Number 27, 2006. Pages 21-43.]

“We draw attention to how fictionalizing has become a common and often unquestioned part of responding to concerns about anonymity raised by research ethics boards, but we also move beyond those concerns to other intentions and purposes of fictionalizing in narrative inquiry. We see three purposes for fictionalization: (a) protection of the identities of participants, (b) creation of distance between ourselves and our experiences, and (c) a way to engage in imagination that enriches inquiry spaces and research understandings. We turn first to a brief explication of narrative inquiry, the methodological context for our work.” [Vera Caine, M. Shaun Murphy, Andrew Estefan, D. Jean Clandinin, Pamela Steeves, and Janice Huber, “Exploring the Purposes of Fictionalization in Narrative Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry. OnlineFirst edition. April, 2016. Pages 1-7.]

“In this article, we used narrative inquiry to explore the effects of long-term violence and trauma. Through personal accounts across a 20-year period in Northern Ireland, it became apparent that people experience the effects of trauma many years after the events.” [Karola Dillenburger, Montserrat Fargas, and Rym Akhonzada, “Long-Term Effects of Political Violence: Narrative Inquiry Across a 20-Year Period.” Qualitative Health Research. Volume 18, number 10, October 2008. Pages 1312-1322]

“Narrative inquiry, ‘an amalgam of interdisciplinary analytic lenses, diverse disciplinary approaches, and both traditional and innovative methods,’ centers on ‘biographical particulars as narrated by the one who lives them’ …. By utilizing a narrative approach as my research methodology, I hope to give voice to aspects of identity that have previously been under-examined in the life of psychotherapists.” [Karen Estrella, “Narrative Inquiry and Arts-Based Inquiry: Multinarrative perspectives.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 47, number 3, July 2007. Pages 376-383.]

“As we traced … some of the ways narrative inquiry has shaped our understanding of the in- and out-of-classroom places within schools, we wanted to continue to make visible the importance of attending to the intersections, to the bumping up places, and to tensions experienced in multiple places and relationships in which life curriculum is made and lived. Attending to these diverse places and relationships allows us to understand narrative inquiry as holding extraordinary potential for shaping pedagogy, that is, for shaping how we might live alongside one another, in classrooms, schools, universities, and communities.” [Janice Huber, Vera Caine, Marilyn Huber, and Pam Steeves, “Narrative Inquiry as Pedagogy in Education: The Extraordinary Potential of Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving Stories of Experience.” Review of Research in Education. Volume 37, March 2013. Pages 212-242.]

“In this article, we explicate how Narrative Inquiry may be lived in health-care education and practice, with a primary focus on nursing. We illustrate the process of the Narrative Inquiry approach through elaboration on the inquirer-participant relationship, storying of experience, and circles of analysis. We reveal how we support our graduate students, the next generation of narrative inquirers, through a Narrative Inquiry Works-in-Progress group.” [Gail M. Lindsay, and Jasna K. Schwind, “Narrative Inquiry: Experience matters.” Canadian Journal of Nursing Research. OnlineFirst edition. August, 2016. Pages 1-7.]

“This article offers an overview of narrative inquiry, an approach that focuses on the use of stories as data. The idea of narrative inquiry is that stories are collected as a means of understanding experience as lived and told, through both research and literature. Peter Pan is seen as listening to stories in order to make sense not only of his own world but also those of Wendy and her siblings.” [Maggi Savin-Baden and Lana Van Niekerk, “Narrative Inquiry: Theory and Practice.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education. Volume 31, number 3, September 2007. Pages 359-472.]

“Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators. Part of the appeal is, no doubt, the comfort that comes from thinking about telling and listening to stories. This comfort associated with narratives and stories carries into a sense of comfort with research that attends to teachers’ and teacher educators’ stories.” [D. Jean Clandinin, Debbie Pushor, and Anne Murray Orr, “Navigating Sites for Narrative Inquiry.” Journal of Teacher Education. Volume 58, number 1, January/February 2007. Pages 21-35.]

“In this article, I use narrative inquiry and self-study to examine my own curricula decisions in teaching race in a course with mostly White teacher education students. Using racialized narratives in teacher education courses can help circumvent resistance and disengagement among education students where race and racism are concerned. Such a focus is important to the education of students in all schools, and particularly to students in urban schools. Urban schools are often populated by students of color and students from lower social classes, whereas teachers are overwhelmingly White and middle class.” [H. Richard Milner IV, “Race, Narrative Inquiry, and Self-Study in Curriculum and Teacher Education.” Education and Urban Society. Volume 39, number 4, August 2007. Pages 584-609.]

“Although relatively new to the field of music education research, narrative inquiry is proving useful to researchers seeking insight into the human experience of musical engagement and the social worlds in which music-making occurs. Narrative scholarship is distinctive both for its emergent, recursive process of inquiry and its prioritization of mutuality in the relationship between researcher and participant.” [Jeananne Nichols, “Sharing the Stage: Ethical Dimensions of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education.” Journal of Research in Music Education. Volume 63, number 4, 2016. Pages 439-454.]

“Our own experiences remind us that stories are important; they sustain us and remind us that lives are lived, told, retold, and relived in storied ways. Stories are what we know, how we know, and stories are how we live. Story is that which ties together people in places, and across time. Stories are our obligation to others, and stories create obligations for us as researchers. Narrative inquiry, defined as both research methodology and a view of phenomena, is the intimate study of an individual’s experience over time and in context ….” [Vera Caine and Andrew Estefan, “The Experience of Waiting: Inquiry Into the Long-term Relational Responsibilities in Narrative Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry. Volume 17, number 10, 2011. Pages 965-971.]

“Three commonplaces, temporality, sociality, and place …, are often used to bound narrative inquiry.” [Vanessa L. Bond and Lisa Huisman Koops, “Together Through Transitions: A Narrative Inquiry of Emergent Identity as Music Teacher Educators.” Journal of Music Teacher Education. Volume 24, number 1, 2014. Pages 38-50.]

“[Karl] Marx’s numerous anti-Jewish invectives, voiced in his private correspondence, are of lesser significance than his ignorance of the importance of the Jewish question, as it came into focus during his life. It would be a distortion to claim that Marx established an ‘anti-Semitic tradition of modern Socialism’; attempts to suggest this ultimately failed to convince. Yet Marxism indeed underestimated the vitality of Jewish existence in ethnic-cultural, not to mention religious, terms. Marx and [Friedrich] Engels viewed any Jewish national project as hopelessly fictitious and advocated full Jewish assimilation. Modern capitalism would, according to Marxist positions, make complete assimilation inevitable, disintegrating the foundations of Jewish particular and ‘caste’ existence.” [Mario Kessler. On Anti-Semitism and Socialism: Selected Essays. Berlin, Germany: Trafo Verlag. 2005. Page 23.]

“Using narrative to explain action makes clear why most of these researchers do not adhere to a strict definition of narrative, but also incorporate argumentative forms of language. They are interested in what drives the action of actors, how they make the ‘normative leap’ from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ …. Actors use both narrative and argumentation for this goal—where narratives in a strict sense are stories about a sequence of events with beginning, middle, and ends, as in scenarios, and where arguments are built from premises to conclusions.…

“Within this strand of literature, researchers explicitly reject judging the different narratives in terms of truth value or establishing the primacy of one narrative over another—though some do try to explain empirically why a specific narrative has become dominant …. Implicitly or explicitly, this research often critiques the dominant narrative, given the presence of equally valid alternatives often voiced by less powerful stakeholders. This point is equally important at different stages in the policy process—from competing problem definitions to competing evaluations of policies …. Along the same lines, this research critiques technocratic approaches in these cases, since issues can no longer be decided by appealing to ‘objective facts.’”

[Michel J. G. van Eeten, “Narrative Policy Analysis.” Handbook of Public Policy Analysis: Theory, Politics, and Methods. Frank Fischer, Gerald J. Miller, and Mara S. Sidney, editors. Boca Raton, Florida, London, and New York: CRC Press imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Pages 251-269.]

“Critical research demands that we interrogate our own positionality and social location. Critical reflexivity is a form of researcher critical consciousness that is constant and dynamic in a complex spiral-like process starting within our own experiences as racialized, gendered, and classed beings embedded in particular sociopolitical contexts. Across diverse critical methodologies, a group of graduate students and their supervisor explored their own conceptualization of the reflexivity spiral by reflecting on how their research motivations and methodologies emerged from their racializing, colonizing, language-learning, parenting, and identity negotiating experiences. In this article, they present a spiral model of the critical reflexivity process, review the literature on reflexivity, and conclude with a description of critical reflexivity as a social practice within a supportive and collaborative graduate school experience.…

“… [The] ongoing and interactive relationship between the researcher, her reflexivity, and research design is exactly why the authors envisioned the research process as a spiral within which methodology is only a part, but a part to which they repeatedly spiraled back and forth throughout the research journey. For example, they foreshadow and reflect on methodology when choosing and illustrating research epistemology, ontology, axiology, theoretical framework, and literature review. They also go back to refer to methodology when considering ethics, methods, data collection, analysis, and writing.”

[Li Mao, Ayesha Mian Akram, Donna Chovanec, and Misty L. Underwood, “Embracing the Spiral: Researcher Reflexivity in Diverse Critical Methodologies.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods. January–December 2016. Pages 1-8.]

“The family is a vertical institution linking three distinct scales of social reproduction in capitalism. First, families serve as the primary generative institution of social individuals and of individual workers. Second, families (along with workplaces), operate as sites of collective labor through which the working class is objectively constituted (we shall return later to the roles families do and might play in the development of a subjectively constituted working class). Third, families link the working class to the state, and serve a vital function in subordinating the working class to capital’s profit imperative. They serve as a means of coercion of individual workers, and against workers as a whole. The costs of reproduction can be externalized from the profit relation to families, both directly in the worker-employer relationship and through the remnants of state social services.

“Since the project of communism is to collapse these three levels of social reproduction into a single organically constituted sphere, the communist perspective attends to the ways in which the extant family not only links the three spheres of social reproduction but simultaneously holds them at a remove from one another. Any proposal to abolish the family must first attend to theorizing the role of the family and social reproduction in revolutionary politics as well as to develop caring institutions which might supplant the capitalist family.”

[K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson. Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21ˢᵗ-Century Family and a Communist Proposal for its Abolition. Kurrajong, New South Wales, Australia: Subversion Press. 2013. No pagination.]

“In the last few years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance new conceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labour in the academy, museum, mass media, and gallery networks while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village. Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing.” [Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During, editor. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Pages 257-267.]

“The term ‘cultural studies’ has a long and complicated history, referring to both a particular school of thought (or several related schools) and an ever-expanding set of academic research programs. ‘Cognitive cultural studies’ most commonly evokes the second, broad meaning of the term, thus connoting the incorporation of insights from cognitive science into the study of cultural practices. Yet the first, more specific, meaning turns out to be also directly relevant, in fact, crucially so, as the field of cognitive cultural studies seeks to position itself inside mainstream cultural theory.” [Lisa Zunshine, “Introduction: What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Lisa Zunshine, editor. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Pages 1-34.]

“Because cultural models contain historical as well as universal constituents, all cultural models are subject to the vagaries of cultural hegemony. As the example of baseball demonstrates, the constraints of structure operate and the possibilities of agency manifest themselves at the cognitive level as well as at the external level of cultural practice. Despite the dominance of racism and sexism on the social imagination, some baseball managers and spectators could and did play with mental images of allfemale and racially integrated teams as well as with images of less homogeneous audiences for the sport. For other managers and spectators, however, the game in their minds would remain male and white, regardless of historical changes and the consequent pressure to adjust their social schemas about baseball.” [Bruce McConachie, “Toward a Cognitive Cultural Hegemony.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Lisa Zunshine, editor. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Pages 134-150.]

“… [The] new model, which is the accumulation of practices past and present, has come to be called transformative organizing.

“If organizing is the attempt to bring people together to take collective action to resolve a commonly identified problem, then transformative organizing is a particular approach to organizing that situates individual campaigns within a conscious analysis of the underlying systems of exploitation and oppression. Transformative organizing is defined by its explicit intention to transform both those systems and the individuals engaged in those campaigns in an effort to win genuine liberation for all. The model is still in development, but the practice that it is based on is strong and growing in the United States and around the globe. Of course, transformative organizing looks very different based on the place and conditions in which that work is happening. Transformative organizing looks different in Grahamstown, South Africa than it does in San Francisco, United States, but there are core principles that are shared by transformative organizations.”

[Steve Williams. Demand Everything: Lessons of the Transformative Organizing Model. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. March, 2013. Page 4.]

“It might be time to put [Karl] Marx’s famous quote back on its feet: ‘Social scientists have transformed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to interpret it.’ But to interpret, we need to abandon the strange idea that all languages are translatable in the already established idiom of the social. Such a preparatory training is important since, as we will see in the next chapter, social aggregates might not be made of human ties.” [Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Page 42.]

“… actor-network theory (hence ANT) has very little to do with the study of social networks. These studies, no matter how interesting, concern themselves with the social relations of individual human actors – their frequency, distribution, homogeneity, proximity. It was devised as a reaction to the often too global concepts like those of institutions, organizations, states and nations, adding to them a more realistic and smaller set of associations. Although ANT shares this distrust for such vague all-encompassing sociological terms, it also aims at describing the very nature of societies. But to do so it does not limit itself to human individual actors, but extends the word actor – or actant – to non-human, non-individual entities.” [Bruno Latour, “On actor-network theory: A few clarifications.” Soziale Welt. Volume 47, number 4, 1996. Pages 369-381.]

“ANT [actor-network theory] doesn’t claim that we will ever know if society is ‘really’ made of small individual calculative agents or of huge macroactors; nor does it claim that since anything goes one can pick a favorite candidate at whim. On the contrary, it draws the relativist, that is, the scientific conclusion that those controversies provide the analyst with an essential resource to render the social connections traceable. ANT simply claims that once we are accustomed to these many shifting frames of reference a very good grasp of how the social is generated can be provided, since a relativist connection between frames of reference offers a better source of objective judgment than the absolute (that is, arbitrary) settings suggested by common sense.” [Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Page 30.]

“The mobilization of the world and of communities on an ever-larger scale multiplies the actors who make up our natures and our societies, but nothing in their mobilization implies an ordered and systematic passage of time. However, thanks to their quite peculiar form of temporality, the moderns will order the proliferation of new actors either as a form of capitalism, an accumulation of conquests, or as an invasion of barbarians, a succession of catastrophes. Progress and decadence are their two great resources, and the two have the same origin. On each of these three lines – calendar time, progress, decadence – it will be possible to locate the antimoderns, who accept modern temporality but reverse its direction. In order to wipe out progress or degeneracy, they want to return toward the past – as if there were a past!” [Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter, translator. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1993. Page 72.]

“‘Ah, I knew it—here the social constructivist is showing the tip of his donkey’s ear! Here are the sophists who proliferate in the obscurity scurity of the Cave. You want to reduce all the exact sciences to simple social representations. Extend multiculturalism to politics. Deprive politics of the only transcendence capable of decisively putting an end to its interminable squabbles.’ And yet it is precisely on this point that science studies, in combination with militant ecology, allows us to break with the deceptive self-evidence of the social sciences by completely abandoning the theme of social constructivism. If the objectors jectors continue to be suspicious, it is because they do not understand that political ecology, in combination with science studies, allows a movement that had always been forbidden before.” [Bruno Latour. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pages 36-37.]

“Certainly if ANT [actor-network theory] has any scientific content, it has to be structuralist.

“… it [the actor] fulfills a function. This is what is so great about structuralism, if I have understood it correctly. Any other agent in the same position would be forced to do the same.”

[Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Page 153.]

“[Bruno] Latour returns to Plato’s cave myth repeatedly … suggesting at one point that if sociology is to stop making the same old mistake, that of saying that nature is socially constructed but society is not, if it is to break with ‘the deceptive self-evidence of the social sciences,’ and with social constructionism, it must ‘change the notion of the social, which we inherited, like the rest, from the age of the cave’ ….” [Charles Turner, “Travels without a donkey: The adventures of Bruno Latour.” History of the Human Sciences. Volume 28, number 1, February 2015. Pages 118-138.]

“How to think about ‘actor-network theory’? It does not relate in any direct way to social network theories – though like these it may be generally understood as an expression of a longer term trend, visible for a century but more strongly since 1945, towards system-like and relational modes for understanding the natural, the social and the technical. Indeed, for the reasons I’ve just touched on, actor-network theory doesn’t really count as a form of sociology. Unsurprisingly, it is a source of frustration for those who seek strong social explanations for the origins of phenomena. For similar reasons it is also frustrating for those primarily concerned with social critique.” [John Law, “On sociology and STS.” The Sociological Review Volume 56, number 4, 2008. Pages 623-649.]

“The working definition of actor networks in this paper is: The traces of relationships between people, institutions, and artifacts connected by agreements and exchanges.

“A refined description of actor network stresses that this theoretical framework explains the interactions without the strong reliance on contingency characteristic of [Anthony] Giddens’ structuration theory and [Roy] Bhaskar’s critical realist structuration theory. Actor network theories are as much ontologies as epistemologies …, in which coordination is an issue of relationships.”

[Francis Harvey, “Constructing GIS: Actor Networks of Collaboration.” Journal of the Urban and Rural Information Systems Association (URISA Journal). Volume 13, 2001. Pages 29-37.]

“ANT [actor network theory] positions the world as an outcome of a process of inquiry, which is constructed generatively and ontologically, rather than epistemologically …. Following wider poststructural theorisation, ANT calls for the recognition of theory, methodology and self as vital means through which an emergent reality is created—a research reality/network. This approach is opposed to modernist logic or Enlightenment rhetoric, where one claims to view a scene objectively, where knowledge is positioned as truth, as grand, totalising theories implying universal applicability ….” [Kristian Ruming, “Following the Actors: mobilising an actor-network theory methodology in geography.” Australian Geographer. Volume 40, number 4, December 2009. Pages 451-469.]

“Actor-network theory is ‘co-constructionist’: it seeks to identify how relations and entities come into being together.…

“[Bruno] Latour first outlined his alternative to social studies of science during an analysis of Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the anthrax vaccine …, and it is worth outlining this case study as it illustrates the co-constructionist character of ANT [actor-network theory].”

[Jonathan Murdoch, “Ecologising Sociology: Actor-Network Theory, Co-construction and the Problem of Human Exemptionalism.” Sociology. Volume 35, number 1, February 2001. Pages 111-133.]

“ANT [actor-network theory] and its poststructuralist approach to the social and the technical offered a non-dualist approach and acknowledged that what some define as technical may be seen as social by others and that it is this very construction, negotiation and even dispute about the boundary which is of interest ….” [Nathalie Mitev, “In and out of actor-network theory: a necessary but insufficient journey.” Information Technology & People. Volume 22, number 1, 2009. Pages 9-25.]

“… the symmetry of actor-network theory is set in … [a distinctive] ontological space …. Actor-network does away entirely with the two poles … [‘human and material agency’], treating the constructed world in between as the only admissible reality. There is no unbridgeable divide between the agents and objects of construction. If any of these objects is constructed, they all are.…

“… Actor-network … gives us structures without structuralism.”

[Daniel Breslau, “Sociology after Humanism: A Lesson from Contemporary Science Studies.” Sociological Theory. Volume 18, number 2, July 2000. Pages 289-307.]

“Actor Network Theory (ANT), otherwise known as the sociology of translation, rejects the idea that ‘social relations’ are independent of the material and natural world …. The contribution of ANT to organization studies lies in recognizing that there is no such thing as a purely social actor or purely social relation …. This contribution is significant in helping to bring the ‘missing masses’ … of non-human actors into the frame – an important and timely move, given the influence of the linguistic turn in organization theory.” [Andrea Whittle and André Spicer, “Is Actor Network Theory Critique?” Organization Studies. Volume 29, number 04, 2008. Pages 611-629.]

“… despite its apparent simplicity, ANT’s [actor network theory’s] basic ontology continues to be problematic for at least three reasons: 1) ambiguous positions on a number of issues, e.g. the extent to which nonhumans have agency … or the presence of contradictory ways to read the claim that the world exists only as assemblages …; 2) logical problems stemming from the wholesale adoption of Latourian relationalism, e.g. its inability to explain change …; 3) unsolved issues, e.g. how to avoid the lapse into an infinite regress of mediations when explaining how translation occurs …. This is not the place to go into detail with each of these arguments – they simply serve as a reminder that many ontological aspects of ANT are still open for debate and cannot be infinitely postponed simply by switching to a higher level of abstraction or claiming not to ‘do theory’ at all.” [Laur Kanger, “Mapping ‘the ANT multiple’: A comparative, critical and reflexive analysis.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. July, 2017. Pages 1-28.]

“The theory proposed in this work, Critical Actor-Network Theory (CANT), weaves together components of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Critical Theory (CT). This combination can enable researchers to critically examine technologies as they currently exist, but it also provides mechanisms to help guide design.…

“Critical Actor-Network Theory (CANT) is a hybrid theory that supports design and analysis. CANT supports crucial work for HCDS [Human-Centered Data Science] including: the explicit examination of power, reflection on bias, network tracing, and analysis of long-term impacts.…

“CANT goes beyond the analysis of power in institutions and societies, requiring designers to question and challenge their own assumptions through self-reflection.”

[Margaret Drouhard and Cecilia Aragon, “Critical Actor-Network Theory: Hybrid Theory for Visual Analytics.” Presented at the 19th Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. San Francisco, California. February 27th–March 2nd, 2016. Pages 1-5. Retrieved on September 2nd, 2016.]

“The goal of this article is to explore the mechanisms of cosmopolitanism and provide a more solid theoretical foundation for emerging research on the topic. To this end, I build on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). ‘Network’ is one of the most theoretically robust concepts distilled from the so-called relational perspective in sociology …. Among various forms of network analysis, ANT may appear an unlikely candidate for theorizing mechanisms because it is typically seen as descriptive rather than explanatory. For Latour, however, ‘description’ is an alternative form of ‘explanation’—from a variable-based, causal-analytic approach …. I argue that ANT can help the sociology of cosmopolitanism increase its explanatory power precisely because it is the most descriptive analysis.…

“I … draw on ANT to specify mechanisms that mediate the presumed causal relationship between globalization and the development of cosmopolitanism. Specifically, I argue that cosmopolitan openness is of two kinds: openness to foreign nonhumans, and openness to foreign humans. I examine these two kinds of openness as instances of ‘cultural omnivorousness’ and ‘ethnic tolerance,’ respectively. In addition, 1 consider how foreign nonhumans and humans combine to create a transnational public to debate global risks and work out collective solutions—to engage in ‘cosmopolitics.’ In short, this article proposes ANT-based mechanisms of cultural omnivorousnes, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitics as three key elements of cosmopolitanism.”

[Hiro Saito, “An Actor-Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism.” Sociological Theory. Volume 29, number 2, June 2011. Pages 124-149.]

“The cosmopolitan gaze opens wide and focuses – stimulated by the postmodern mix of boundaries between cultures and identities, accelerated by the dynamics of capital and consumption, empowered by capitalism undermining national borders, excited by the global audience of transnational social movements, and guided and encouraged by the evidence of worldwide communication (often just another word for misunderstanding) on central themes such as science, law, art, fashion, entertainment, and, not least, politics. World-wide public perception and debate of global ecological danger or global risks of a technological and economic nature (‘Frankenstein food’) have laid open the cosmopolitan significance of fear.” [Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity.” British Journal of Sociology. Volume 51, ssue 1, January/March 2000. Pages 79-105.]

“We are only at a very early stage in the disintegration of the liberal hegemony, and we cannot predict the practical or theoretical forms that left alternatives to it may take, let alone what success they might have. The vicissitudes of world history in the twentieth century brought surprises enough: who can doubt that this one will bring more? This sense of being at the start of a new and as yet unfathomable historical period makes open-minded and constructive debate essential on these questions.” [Alex Callinicos, “Impossible Anti-Capitalism?” New Left Review. Series II, number 2, March–April 2000. Pages 117-124.]

“I have argued that the two major philosophical distinctions (immanence vs. transcendence, plentitude vs. lack) called upon to categorize the various proponents of a new political ontology are both important and insufficient. They are important because they help identify the overall goal of the ontological neo-left, which is political participation and collective inclusion in society. Their shared objective remains to overcome the inside/outside dialectic by means of a non-foundational ontology. But they are insufficient for two reasons: first, because they occlude other important similarities and distinctions that both sever and connect these theorists, as shown above. And second, because they are philosophical distinctions that claim to discern the political potential allegedly inherent in different ontologies. But we already know that there is no pre-determined path leading from philosophy to politics, from thought to action—unless we return to traditional metaphysics or orthodox Marxism.” [Carsten Strathausen, “A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology.” Postmodern Culture. Volume 16, number 3, May, 2006. Pages 1-38.]

“To conclude: the strategic question facing contemporary social movements and their use of social media today is that of how to maintain a degree of continuity once, for whatever reason, they can no longer rely on the role played by occupied squares as nodal points in their texture of participation. Finding solutions to this dilemma will involve a deep organisational rethink (there were signs of this already taking place as the book went to print), and at the same time a rethink of the ways in which various forms of protest communications and social media in particular are utilised as means of mobilisation. Whatever the solutions, the commitment of these movements to the symbolic reconstruction of a new sense of public space will continue to be of fundamental importance in the coming years, both in the West and in the Arab World.” [Paolo Gerbaudo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2012. Page 168.]

“Ideology constitutes individuals who will more or less submit to the existing order. The manner in which this subjection is accomplished varies in different types of social formations. In some social formations individuals may be aware of their subjection but accept it as legitimate or at least inescapable. In capitalist social formations the emphasis given to the individual as subject in the first sense obscures subjection as subject in the second sense; the individual perceives submission as freely chosen. Hence lies the power of ideology in capitalist social formations: the production of subjects whose imaginary relation to real relations is that of initiators of action.…

“The concept of a material matrix of affirmations and sanctions gives substance to the notion of the ‘materiality of ideology,’ while avoiding [Louis] Althusser’s radial claim that ideology is only material practices and not ideas.”

[Terry E. Boswell, Edgar V. Kiser, and Kathryn E. Baker, “Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of Ideology.” Critical Sociology. Volume 25, number 2/3, March 1999. Pages 358-383.]

“Psychoanalysis as a technique, then, is naturally dialectical and social. Psychoanalytical theory, however, can only become truly social when it realizes that, within its own perspectives,it is analyzing social exchanges. In effect, even before a child’s birth his future is conditioned by his position in the family; the child’s response to that position will in turn modify the family’s attitudes; and it is through this open and unceasing dialogue that he will assume his personality. This spiral development is not an abstract ‘ideal’; it is revealed in the child’s real, malleable relations with his environment.

“The psychoanalytic dialectic must be social because man can only exist and develop within society. The great psychic mechanisms like identification, projection, introjection, repression, sublimation, rationalization—in the way they are described by psychoanalysts—often appear to be sterile, purely intra-psychic exercises, leading nowhere. But if they were, they could have no existence. They exist only because they function, and they function only because they are, in reality, historical and inter-psychic.”

[Igor Caruso, “Psychoanalysis and Society.” New Left Review. Series I, number 32, July–August 1965. Pages 24-31.]

“Pragmatic humanism … asserts the idea that ‘a person’s moral character – his or her selective sensitivity to the pain suffered by others – is shaped by chance events in his or her life’ … so that in distinction to [Zygmunt] Bauman’s Levinasian motto, ‘[i]f in doubt – consult your conscience’ …, based as it is upon the assumption that such a moral conscience lies (whence it came, we know not) waiting to be heeded within us all, pragmatic humanism instead acknowledges that one’s social environment may never have given birth to such a precognitive impulse, may have dampened or distorted its efficacy, but conversely, and more promisingly, may therefore also help in generating and nurturing such an impulse. In this sense it recognises that human moralities are, as [Jeffrey] Weeks … puts it, ‘invented moralities’, but that this fact makes them no less significant or vital to human concerns. Both immorality and morality are treated as thoroughly social in this model, and therefore work can and must be done towards not merely avoiding the possibilities of immorality, but also educating and developing our moral sensibilities too ….

“Again, one way in which this work might in part be carried out is through determined and responsible sociological representations of shared precarity. Public spheres that fail in this task and only circulate richly narrativised representations of the suffering of those occupying privileged positions in the hierarchy of bodily security (royalty, celebrities, our troops, our citizens), must ultimately be seen as morally dubious cultures to live within. From this view, part of sociology’s ‘value’ might be reconceptualised as residing less in its capacity for scientific enlightenment, and more in its ability to offer empathetic and carefully contextualised representations of the suffering of those whom either the media bypass, or for whom the frames through which they are brought into visibility foreclose the possibility of responding ‘with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without regard for their value as lives’ …. Whilst the road from emotional identification, through ethical responsibility, to practical mobilisation, is certainly littered with challenging obstacles to be overcome, such obstacles hardly present adequate justifications for dismissing the necessity of the project itself.”

[Marcus Morgan. Pragmatic Humanism: On the Nature and Value of Sociological Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Page 111.]

“Pragmatic humanism … pursues something different to that which traditional philosophical or religious ethics aimed at; not some timeless ethical law, shared human essence or virtue, rationally-grounded and deontological categorical imperative or universal moral sentiment, but rather a tactical refocusing of our attention away from what Freud described as a ‘narcissism of minor differences’ … and back upon recognition of the pain of those seemingly unlike ourselves as in fact remarkably similar to our own, and from this recognition attempts to create, rather than reveal human solidarity. Once solidarity has been established in small groups, the aspiration is one of outward spread: ‘a matter of being able to respond to the needs of ever more inclusive groups of people’ …. With this spread, and because there is no terminal ‘truth’ to moral questions, inevitably comes a development in the content of morality, so that ‘ethics’ comes to be seen as a set of morphing agonistic conversations rather than the imperial expansion of one particular fixed set of local assertions, something [Richard] Rorty himself, caught up in his unreflectively liberalistic and nationalistic concerns, certainly failed to stress ….” [Marcus Morgan, “The poverty of (moral) philosophy: Towards an empirical and pragmatic ethics.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 17, number 2, May 2014. Pages 129-146.]

“Although, … on a Foucauldian reading, structure may be seen as enabling or generative of subjectivity, the position defended here points to a fuller account of the subject as capable of surpassing the structures that may in various other ways enable or limit its expression. Whilst therefore (as sociology habitually demonstrates) antihumanistic forces are seen as shaping us in diverse and powerful ways, they ‘never shape us completely. Even when they do not invite us to defy and to change them, we can defy and change them nevertheless. There always remains in us a residue or a surfeit of untamed and inexhaustible capability’ ….” [Marcus Morgan, “The responsibility for social hope.” Thesis Eleven. Volume 136, number 1, October 2016. Pages 107-123.]

“… [As Marcus] Morgan’s pragmatic humanism argues …: the future of humanism is made to depend on whether it can stop appealing to any form of transcendence – however modest.” [Daniel Chernilo, “Review essay: Humanism and sociology.” Journal of Classical Sociology. Volume 16, number 3, 2016. Pages 310-317.]

“… I outline a call for the reconstruction of a Marcusean ‘pro-life’ politics, and then close with a discussion of how [Herbert] Marcuse provides an under-utilized theory of politics as education and a revolutionary conception of humanitas, through which Marcuse sought to work to overcome the historical struggle and dichotomy between culture and nature, as well as the human and non-human animal. The conclusion offered is that Marcuse is a founding figure of a revolutionary ecopedagogy that says ‘No!’ to the violent destruction of the earth, as it works to manifest a critical post-humanism based upon new life sensibilities that amounts to a utopian ‘Yes!’ that will come to displace and end domination and repression broadly conceived.” [Richard Kahn, “The Educative Potential of Ecological Militancy in an Age of Big Oil: towards a Marcusean ecopedagogy.” Policy Futures in Education. Volume 4, number 1, 2006. Pages 31-44.]

“Underlying the new neoliberalism’s circumvention of critical forms of knowledge there gapes the truth it is so anxious to avoid—the absence of profitable alternatives to the current, broken model of capitalist accumulation, which it is striving to prop up. Global capitalist development has been confounded by its own success: it has brought about massive over-capacity in manufacturing, with a glut in production driving down profits, combined with a huge over-supply of labour, weakening wages and therefore demand. With only the occasional brief uptick, profitability rates have been falling, business cycle on business cycle, since the end of the trente glorieuses. Underlying this is the drastic failure to achieve a viable and profitable model of capitalism since the demise of Fordist Keynesianism. The once tacit, and now explicit, dependence of the neoliberal model upon the rising indebtedness of public and private sectors has been, as Streeck shows, a forty-year-long exercise in kicking the can down the road. Ultimately, the function of apparently irrational symptoms in today’s neoliberalism is to duck or conceal this realization.” [William Davies, “The New Neoliberalism.” New Left Review. Series II, number 101. September–October 2016. Pages 121-134.]

“Let’s examine dialectical reason …. It seeks to discern a space of synthetic excess born of the contradictions between the capitalist accumulation process – its forces of production (e.g. the social intellect, knowledge sharing, freeware, and so forth) and the relations of production (e.g. private property, patent laws, copyright, the HRM [human resource management] office, the neoliberal state, etc.). The overflowing social surplus that results is divined by way of analytically extending those contradictions towards capitalism’s own structural inabilities. That is to say, those irreconcilable qualities that cannot be subsumed within the universal process and thus explode into a clearing in order to exist for their own sake. A distant and emancipatory ‘other’ emerges from capitalism’s own contradictory dynamics; we might call this democratic communism.” [Peter Fleming. The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself. London: Pluto Press. 2015. Page 160.]

“You spend more time on the job than you do at home and with your family. That is sad. You have people who work forty-plus hours a week and still barely make enough to even live life. That is inhumane. Like many hardworking people, we do not choose to work and spend most of our days at the job. We only work because, if we didn’t, we would be homeless. This is an opinion piece I posted a while back: ‘I’m thinking about quitting my job to focus on building up my own brand and work on myself. But if I did that I’d be homeless. Isn’t it sad that in this world that if you do not work for an overseer you do not have the right to live? You do not have the right to have a roof over your head, water, food, electricity, etc. Who gave these groups of people the right to monopolize the world resources and put a price tag on them? Capitalism is just modern day slavery. A way to give a select few people the power to control and regulate the world. Money has no value yet it decides the quality of life you will live. I’m going to destroy this system.’” [The Unknown Revolutionary. Killing Capitalism: Ending Modern Day Slavery and Leaving The Corporate Plantation. North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace, a DBA of On-Demand Publishing, LLC. 2016. Kindle edition.]

“I name the four reconstructed positions liberal-individualist, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomist Marxist. My research indicates that these positions characterize widely influential understandings in digital democracy rhetoric and practice. However, I do not claim that they in any way exhaust the e-democracy positions that could be explicated. Given more space and research resources we could identify and explore a number of other e-democracy articulations, including cyber-feminist …, communitarian …, cyber-libertarian …, liberal digital commonism …, and postmodern ….” [Lincoln Dahlberg, “Re-constructing digital democracy: An outline of four ‘positions.’” New Media & Society. Volume 13, number 6, 2011. Pages 855-872.]

“We are now in a position to give a partial characterization of this sort of [fictional] realism. I shall call it ‘realism of character.’ Given what was said earlier about empathy, it follows that one very important way of understanding the minds of others is by imaginatively projecting ourselves into their situations, seeing how we respond to their situations in imagination. To the extent that our own minds are models of theirs, we are then able to understand their thoughts and actions on the basis of our own imagined response. I say that a work possesses realism of character when it enables us to engage in that same kind of empathic understanding with its characters. When we can respond that way to its characters, we are responding to fiction as to life.” [Gregory Currie, “Realism of character and the value of fiction.” Aesthetics and ethics: Essays at the intersection. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pages 161-181.]

“… attempts to transfer the logic of natural selection to other domains betray an ignorance both of debates among biologists over its workings, and of the sociology of scientific knowledge. In what follows we will discuss [Charles] Darwin in the context of his time, the subsequent and current conflicts within evolutionary theory, and its extrapolation into ‘universal Darwinism.’ The framework for our discussion is supplied by the concept of the co-production of science and society. From its birth in the mid-17ᵗʰ century, science assumed an epistemological standpoint outside and above society, receiving cultural authorization to speak the truth about nature.” [Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, “Darwin and After.” New Left Review. Series II, number 63, May–June 2010. Pages 91-113.]

“… the initial idea—quantifying and mapping novelistic emotions—turned out to be neither easy, nor particularly satisfying: in the end, the map of the emotions of London was only partially accomplished. But in pursuing this objective, we found empirical evidence that supported existing theories about emotions in public; we showed how established narratological polarities (foreground/background, story/discourse) preside, not only over the temporality of narrative, but over its geography as well; and we discovered a striking discrepancy between real and fictional geography, while also sketching the first lineaments for a future ‘semantics of space.’ Corroboration, improvement and discovery: the three axes which have defined the variable relationship between quantitative literary research and existing scholarship. Corroboration, improvement and discovery. Eventually, the day for theory-building will also come.” [Stanford Literary Lab, “Mapping London’s Emotions.” New Left Review. Series II, number 101. September–October 2016. Pages 63-91.]

“The most important difference between our accounts [Bruno Latour’s actor network theory and the views of Gijs van Oenen] is that my account of the agency of objects is historical; such agency is not, in my view, a transhistorical or universal phenomenon. That it was recently ‘discovered’ is not accidental, but easily explained considering its recent origin, roughly somewhere in the 1980s. Objects acquired agency when human beings began to interactively engage with them. This was a first moment of ‘emancipation’ for the objects. For human beings however, this was also the moment when interactivity started to become ‘too much of a good thing’ for them. The emancipatory freedom of having to act only on norms one could subscribe to oneself turned into a virtual obligation to always do so, turning a blessing into a burden. Increasingly, we as human beings cannot bring ourselves to act on our own norms. Rather than admit defeat and give up on the interactively acquired capacities, we externalize, or outsource, them: we ask objects to exercise them, on our behalf.” [Gijs van Oenen, “Interpassive Agency: Engaging Actor-Network-Theory’s View on the Agency of Objects.” Theory & Event. Volume 14, issue 2, 2011. Pages 1-19.]

“… Critical Theory rejects authoritarian control and the hegemony of leading ideologies as being dysfunctional and counterproductive for all the reasons so far detailed concerning instrumental reason, methodolatry and the lack of consensus on oughts in music education. It is concerned to educate teachers who problematize paradigms and practices for signs of ideology, false consciousness, and failure to achieve what is promised. In this, the critical thinking of teachers will not simply problem solve. The process of problematizing should lead to an entire rethinking of an issue.” [Thomas A. Regelski, “Critical Theory as a Foundation for Critical Thinking in Music Education.” Visions of Research in Music Education. Volume 6, 2005. Pages 1-24.]

“In the English literary culture of the past century, the ideological basis of organic form is peculiarly visible, as a progressively impoverished bourgeois liberalism attempts to integrate more ambitious, affective ideological modes, thereby entering into conflicts which its artistic forms betray in the act of attempted resolution. The destruction of corporate and organicist ideologies in the political sphere has always been a central task for revolutionaries. The destruction of such ideologies in the aesthetic region is essential not only for a scientific knowledge of the literary past, but for laying the foundation on which the Marxist aesthetics and artistic practice of the future can be built.” [Terry Eagleton, “Ideology and Literary Form.” New Left Review. Series I, number 90, March–April 1975. Pages 81-109.]

“… labour for [Karl] Marx concerns a great deal more than the economic. It involves a whole anthropology—a theory of Nature and human agency, the body and its needs, the nature of the senses, ideas of social cooperation and individual self-fulfillment. This is not economics as the Wall Street Journal knows it. You do not read much about human-species-being in the Financial Times. Labour also involves gender, kinship and sexuality. There is the question of how labourers are produced in the first place, and of how they are materially sustained and spiritually replenished. Production is carried on within specific forms of life, and is thus suffused with social meaning. Because labour always signifies, humans being significant (literally, signmaking) animals, it can never be simply a technical or material affair. You may see it as a way of praising God, glorifying the Fatherland or acquiring your beer money. The economic, in short, always presupposes a lot more than itself. It is not just a matter of how the markets are behaving. It concerns the way we become human beings, not just the way we become stockbrokers.” [Terry Eagleton. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2011. Pages 120-121.]

“[Terry] Eagleton fails to see that the ‘exploited’ wage earners are themselves the ones who discriminate against full employment by taking up the muchmaligned credo of capitalism and Wall Street: ‘“greed is good!”’ By pushing wages higher and developing tight-knit labor unions, minority privileges of the currently-employed proletariat override the individual interests of the chronically-unemployed by splitting industrial profits between fewer workers. Meanwhile, labor unions, like medieval guilds, discriminate against full employment in their protected fields. The hoarding of scarce jobs by the employed minority at artificially-high wage rates creates the need for wage earners to work longer hours for smaller shares in corporate profit.” [Morgan Alexander Brown, “Why Marx Was Right.” Review article. Libertarian Papers. Voluem 3, article 11, 2011. Pages 1-10.]

“[Terry] Eagleton states that the people who talk about the failure of Marxism do not have a proper knowledge of the basics of the Marxian doctrine. [Karl] Marx himself clearly examined the changing nature of systems – from primitive society to capitalism. Eagleton argues that in post-industrial society the – culture of consumerism and growth of services are major economic activities which are a result of the decline of manufacturing profits of capitalists. But the real position at the global level reveals that the working class (both unorganized and organized) is increasing in number and there is centralisation of capital. In such a situation, claims like, ‘the end of history,’ is rather irrelevant and unacceptable. The spectacular rise in inequality of income, wealth and power, and the intensified exploitation under growing capital ism has strengthened the need for radical change. In such circumstances, the fundamental ideas of Marx and Marxism are even more relevant.” [Paramjit Singh, “Why Marx Was Right.” Review article. Social Scientist. Volume 41, number 7/8, July–August 2013. Pages 105-108.]

“It is always difficult to write a book on [Karl] Marx, especially in the current climate of opinion. But [Terry] Eagleton’s book is enchantingly lucid, informative, and an eye-opener. It offers clarifications that would help not only those sympathetic to Marx and Marxism, but also to those unsympathetic to both. Above all, the book comes at the right time in history—when so many are clouded by the fantasy of global capitalist triumph.” [C. Upendra, “Why Marx Was Right.” Review article. Reason Papers. Volume 36, number 1, July 2014. Pages 181-187.]

“Why Marx Was Right is strangely lacking in contemporeity: why, one wonders, is there no reference to the financial crisis and its continuing aftermath? Speculations by finance-capitalists have threatened to bring the system to the point of collapse, as if capitalism were on its (long-deferred) death-throes at last. This situation is ripe for a Marxist critique. Certainly, in a world where resources are more unequally distributed than ever, where the gap between rich and poor – and the poor and the starving – continues to widen, and when the ecology of the planet is under threat, capitalism surely has a lot to answer for. However, as Eagleton is well aware, the sit-ins, protests and demonstrations against its evils in Wall Street, the City of London, and elsewhere, did not take place in the name of Marx – the protesters do want capitalism to be replaced, but are unsure by what: only, as one of the slogans has it, by something nicer.” [Roger Caldwell, “Why Marx Was Right.” Review article. Philosophy Now: a magazine of ideas. December 2016–January 2017. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The Process Model shows how anything we think or say is never only verbally or conceptually defined. Anything we think or say always includes a much larger process that is what I call ‘implicit.’ This much larger ‘implicit’ is still difficult to understand today. It has to be felt in the body, but it is not only inside the body. Rather, it consists of body–environment interaction. ‘Interaction’ comes first. Interaction has always already happened, even when we think about a separate environment and a separate body. I call this ‘interaction-first.’ It leads to a very different kind of thinking of any topic. It may include words and concepts but it is never defined only by words and concepts.” [Eugene T. Gendlin, “A New Way of Thinking – About Anything – and How to Write From It.” Synthesis Philosophica. Volume 29, number 2, April 2015. Pages 307-321.]

“From the spectator standpoint we may know what will happen, because we have often observed the same events ensuing. But let us not assume that the process is a sequence of pre-determined events. Implying is not the same as what will occur. Hunger is not eating. It doesn’t contain a hidden representation of eating. Let us not make the occurring-implying relation into an equation. We don’t need to assume that the process consists of already-defined events that the spectator predicts at time one, observes at time two, and remembers at time three. We need not assume that the implying consists of defined units. In nature a myriad different ways of eating have developed, and more may arise. The implicit is never just equal what will occur.” [Eugene T. Gendlin. A Process Model. Nyack, New York: The International Focusing Institute. 2001. Pages 9-10.]

“I have discussed up to now how the concept of Bildung [formation or education] is inherently future oriented – Bildung is always a Bildung to come – and these materials for the Humboldt-Forum display this nicely. Not only do the pamphlets help encourage desire for as of yet still imaginary architectural enclosures, but the museum is also intended to help secure Germany’s role in the global future. Paradoxically, recycling the structures of the past is the best way to turn to the future. Transforming, cycling through again, recursively reincorporating the past through Wandel [change] and Verwandlung [transformation] is the very structure of the kind of global Bildung that the Humboldt-Forum seeks to encourage. This is deliberately a post-Wende [after the turn-around], postcommunist notion of the future, a future not of the worker but of the global network, a future where the Kulturstaat Preußen [Cultural State of Prussia] re-emerges as a more viable code of visual representation to project to the world than that of the international socialist collective.” [Sean Franzel, “Recycling Bildung: From the Humboldt-Forum to Humboldt and Back.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. Volume 50, number 3, September 2014. Pages 379-397.]

“For [Friedrich] Nietzsche and [Sigmund] Freud, however, we can operate as human beings only by repressing much of what goes into our making. It is our nature to be anti-theoretical, even if we need theory to uncover the fact. Too much repression, to be sure, will make us fall ill; but for this deeply anti-Romantic view, repression is not an evil in itself. We could not speak, think or act without it. Only by self-oblivion can we be ourselves. Amnesia, not remembrance, is what is natural to us. The ego is what it is only by a necessary blindness to much of what constitutes it. To make history, we need first to blot out the squalid, blood-stained genealogy which went into our manufacture. In another sense, this idea is Romantic enough: the intellect is the death of spontaneity. Reflecting too sensitively on the world around you paralyses action, as Hamlet discovered. Or, to translate the sentiment into part of what lurks behind the anti-theory case: If we raise questions about the foundations of our way of life, in the sense of thinking too much about the barbarism on which our civilization is founded, we might fail to do the things that all good citizens should spontaneously do.” [Terry Eagleton. After Theory. New York: Basic Books imprint of the Perseus Books Group. 2003. Page 63.]

“The study of ideology is among other things an inquiry into the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness. It is because being oppressed sometimes brings with it some slim bonuses that we are occasionally prepared to put up with it. The most efficient oppressor is the one who persuades his underlings to love, desire and identify with his power; and any practice of political emancipation thus involves that most difficult of all forms of liberation, freeing ourselves from ourselves. The other side of the story, however, is equally important. For if such dominion fails to yield its victims sufficient gratification over an extended period of time, then it is certain that they will finally revolt against it. If it is rational to settle for an ambiguous mixture of misery and marginal pleasure when the political alternatives appear perilous and obscure, it is equally rational to rebel when the miseries clearly outweigh the gratifications, and when it seems likely that there is more to be gained than to be lost by such action.” [Terry Eagleton. Ideology: An Introduction. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1991. Pages xiii-xiv.]

“The ironic relationship between Marxism and its object, or criticism and its text, is also evident in the relation between a literary text and the history that produces it. All such texts have beginnings and ends, and are consequently modelled in part on a narrative structure they may nonetheless refuse. But in what sense history itself has a beginning and an end is problematical. Empirically speaking, of course, history certainly had a beginning and will no doubt have an end; but we cannot speak of the moment of the origin of history, for to do so means that we are already subsequent to it—already in the midst of significatlons. We cannot think ourselves back beyond language, for we need language in order to do so in the first place. The origin of history can never be a presence: it is, rather, a moment continually displaced and absented by that play of textualization which signifies that we are always already posterior to it. An origin is nothing to speak of. Similarly, we cannot speak of the end of history because there is no imaginable end as long as we can still speak of it.” [Terry Eagleton. Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso Editions imprint of New Left Books. 1981. Pages 69-70.]

“This paper will consider the lack of epistemic pluralism in academia and policymaking processes, and analyze practical implications through the critical theory and neuroscience perspectives. The critical theory perspective is deliberated as a way to challenge the obviousness of policy systems, as well as uncover the limitations in how human beings operate within particular structures and relations with each other. The neuroscience perspective focuses on the brain and behavior and is considered as it has prominent established truths concerning human nature that have not yet been connected with public policymaking.…

“Ultimately, critical theory aims to guide humans toward emancipation from dominating principles about policymaking systems.…

“It has been argued that the utilization of the critical theory and neuroscience perspectives offer a viable approach for superior public policy comprehension by emancipating one-dimensionality and considering the role of the brain. However, only considering these two alternate perspectives is a lamentable oversight. Public policy is not a system that relies solely on one approach, nor should it be reduced to one simplistic method. Employing epistemic pluralism is an intriguing method to fully grasp public policy theory and implement it in the real world.”

[Gilbert Michaud, “Epistemic Pluralism in Public Policy: The Critical Theory and Neuroscience Perspectives.” The Evans School Review. Volume 5, spring 2015. Pages 76-84.]

“The central hypothesis of this paper is that there are several different ‘things’ that a statement may need to fit in order to be deemed true, several different criteria it may need to satisfy; moreover, what it needs to fit depends on the type of statement and the circumstances of the utterance of the sentence that expresses it. Amongst these ‘things’ are the following (the list may not be exhaustive):

“—the criterion of internal consistency;

“—sensory data (which are rarely completely free of the influence of conceptualization);

“—data from memory (long-term and/or short-term; semantic and/or episodic);

“—non-verbalized beliefs (given in the ‘language of thought’ i.e. conceptual structure but not expressed in language);

“—other parts of discourse.

[Joško Žanić, “Truth: A Multiple-Fit Theory.” Synthesis Philosophica. Volume 24, number 2, February 2010. Pages 327-336.]

“The philosophy of the media encompasses the theoretical, the practical and the poetical, but strives not to be determined by the image, grammar, concept, context, performance, performance psychology, or technology – it rather wants to simultaneously preserve and overcome all these things within itself.…

“Philosophy is more than any individual philosophy. The media are more than that which occupies us today, which we call ‘the mass media.’ Philosophy tries to epitomize its time through thoughts. The media serve as intermediaries by means of multimedia. Contemporary intermediation of the mass media also enables us to understand the influences of media on philosophy itself.”

[Sead Alić, “Philosophy of Media – Is the Message.” Synthesis Philosophica. Volume 25, number 2, May 2011. Pages 201-210.]

“Campaigns to strengthen and enforce corporate codes of conduct tend to be more effective among apparel manufacturers who charge a premium to consumers who buy apparel as an identity symbol. These firms know their ‘labels’ can be seriously tainted by negative images.…

“While little progress has been made through state and corporate institutions, gains through an incipient transnational coordinative unionism are appearing. After many efforts to unionize maquilas in Central America and Mexico failed due to intimidation (e.g. mass dismissals of union supporters and death threats) and to state failure to enforce basic labour rights, a Van Heusen plant recently became the first maquiladora in Guatemala to have a union contract. The contract addressed all major union demands including significant wage increases, a grievance procedure, and protection against outsourcing and discrimination by supervisors. This victory is credited in important part to the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation (an ITS [International Trade Secretariat]), UNITE! [Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees], and a non-governmental organization, the U.S. Guatemala Labor Education Project.”

[Don Wells. Building Transnational Coordinative Unionism. Kingston, Ontario: Industrial Relations Centre. 1998. Pages 10-11.]

“Philosophical counseling is more art than science and proceeds in a unique fashion with each individual. Just as psychological therapy comes in countless different forms, philosophical counseling has at least as many permutations as there are practitioners. You can work through a problem philosophically on your own or with the help of a nonprofessional partner. The big question is ‘How?’ Some philosophical counselors—notably Gerd Achenbach—claim justifiably that there is no general method that can be explained or taught. After all, if there’s no general method for doing philosophy, how can there be one for doing philosophical counseling?

“Even so, I have found through experience that many cases conform successfully to a five-step approach I call the PEACE process. This approach gets good results, is easy to follow, and also illustrates what sets philosophical counseling apart from other forms of talk therapy. As you will see, most of the problems presented in this book were resolved by the PEACE process. Maybe yours can be handled that way too. PEACE is an acronym that stands for the five stages you go through: problem, emotion, analysis, contemplation, and equilibrium. The acronym is fitting since these steps are the surest path to lasting peace of mind.”

[Lou Marinoff. Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems. New York: Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 2000. Page 19.]

“Lou Marinoff in his books of the 「Plato not Prozac！」 mentioned about the method of ‘PEACE,’ symbolizing 5 diverse steps applied onto philosophical counseling as follows: P represents Problem, E signifies Emotion, A means Analysis, C denotes Contemplation, and E indicates Equilibrium ….” [Bernard Li, “Application and Practice of the C.I.S.A. Theory.” Journal of Humanities Therapy. Volume 6, number 1, 2015. Pages 1-19.]

“What so-called the ‘C.I.S.A.’ indicates the abbreviation of Consciousness, Insight, Spiritual Moving, and Ascend, the method of which is not only a process, but also a method leading to the physical and psychological maturity. Now I have made a description of its attitude and condition only.…

“In the process of using C.I.S.A., in addition to muster up your courage and face difficulties, more important thing is to take notice of the humanism conception. In the process to devote heartfelt cares, it will not only provide the best service for others, but also review your own perception to pay a bit concerned about yourself and spend more time to listen to others’ voice; the atmosphere surround you will become better due to your attitude. More im portant thing is, in the active attitude, the responsible working mindset and concerned human action will obtain others’ respect, and can realize human dignity and reach the goal of ego accomplishment through the outcome of specific action. Under the integrated viewpoint, develop your personal capability to take care and concern with others, win the deference due to your active and responsible attitude, and obtain a consummate life. In the team-work relation, it is surely a benign cycle between cooperation, communication, sincerity, and self-affirmation. Cooperation of a working team relies on each member’s candid communication, and the motive power to accept, affirm, and cooperate with yourself is no other than because feeling the sincerity one another. There is an infinite possibility. The cooperative relation can affirm each other and manifest your value and others’.”

[Bernard Li, “Application and Practice of the C.I.S.A. Theory.” Journal of Humanities Therapy. Volume 6, number 1, 2015. Pages 1-19.]

“… in my CISA model we see “spiritual moving” and “ascendance” – all of these concepts use spirituality as the final stage of counselling. But this form of counselling is largely different from psychological counselling in that most psychological counselling looks at behaviour and emotion, while the philosophical sort looks at values and spirituality.” [Bernard Li, “Philosophical Counselling and The Cloud of Unknowing.” Care of Self and Meaning of Life: Asian and Christian Reflections. William Sweet and Cristal Huang, editors. Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. 2016. Pages 109-128.]

“Marxism is … essentially a philosophy of liberation or ‘Moksha.’ The deeper purpose of this tabulation of antonyms however, is that it allows us to introduce a ‘third term’ besides the duality of Marxism and Moksha, but one of no little significance in relation to them both: ‘postmodernism.’ For those unfamiliar with the origins of this term, it is rooted in model of language – both language as such and specific languages or ‘modes of discourse’ (not least philosophical, theological, scientific and theoretical languages) as more or less selective structures of mutually defining or opposing terms such as ‘true’ and ‘false,’ ‘black’ and ‘white,’ ‘higher’ and ‘lower,’ ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ ‘creative’ and ‘destructive,’ ‘phenomenon’ and ‘noumenon,’ ‘transcendent’ and ‘imminent.’ Such dichotomies or dualisms, though they take the form of binary pairs or verbal distinctions need not necessarily be understood as contradictory opposites or antonyms. The specific theoretical language or ‘discourse’ of Marxism itself for example, though it revolves around a basic set of binary verbal distinctions or dichotomies such as ‘use value and exchange value,’ ‘base and superstructure,’ ‘man and nature,’ ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism,’ ‘scientific’ and ‘utopian’ socialism etc., understands each term as inseparable from its other – whilst the Marxist theoretical framework as a whole is precisely intended to serve the purpose of exploring the historical evolution and transformations resulting from their inner ‘dialectical’ relation. It is to this purpose that we owe [Karl] Marx’s historic analysis of the relation between the use-value and exchange value of a commodity.” [Peter Wilberg. Rudra’s Red Banner: Marxism and Moksha. Whitstable, England: New Yoga Publications. 2008. Pages 8-9.]

“In respect to evolutionary theory, I have always been a strict constructionist rather than a loose constructionist, and have always felt that the attempt to skip a stage in social evolutionary development could only result, first, in terror and, ultimately, in collapse. The Bolshevik revolution, it may be argued, attempted not merely preclude one stage of social evolution but, as will be discussed later, actually sought to override two such stages.…

“Feudalism➞Capitalism➞Socialism

“When [Vladimir] Lenin abandoned the strict construction of historical materialism in order to take real-world power and pursue the politics of the impossible, he was turning his back on a theory of history that was remarkably unsophisticated. Since it was assumed that feudalism (whatever that meant) was succeeded by capitalism, which in turn was to be followed by socialism, the only question was whether in a precapitalist feudal society like Russia, with an ideologically advanced party, the stage of capitalism could be bypassed, with society going feudalism to socialism.

“But does it make any historical sense to assert that capitalism is the stage of society that succeeds to feudalism? Historians would undoubtedly disagree among themselves about the exact date, but it is theoretically possible to assert that, by a certain date, England had become a capitalist society.“

“The problem in Russia in 1917 was not the skipping of capitalism by going from feudalism to socialism. The problem was that Russia was not yet a modernizing, reasonably centralized nation-state. Since the Bolsheviks set themselves up as the great skippers-of-stages, they were obliged to pass over at least two essential phases of historical evolution. Ironically, it may have been precisely this that allowed the Bolshevik impossible revolution to last so long.”

[Eli Sagan, “The Politics of the Impossible: Or, Whatever Happened to Evolutionary Theory?” Social Research. Volume 59, number 4, winter 1992. Pages 739-758.]

“… a critical theory of dialogue assumes (1) that observable communication behaviors index multiple meanings (systems of relevance) and (2) that through the interplay of these relevances ego and alter selectively found a common core of significance about something. Hence, to explain the phenomenon of small group decision making, a critical theory of dialoguere-quires that the researcher examine not only the communication behaviors, but also the systems of relevance and selectivity of the group. Moreover, from the viewpoint of a critical dialogical theory, ISM’s [interact system model of communication’s] descriptive explanation of decision making is problematic since the researcher must assume that the meaning of a communicative behavior remains static over time. Thus, a critical theory of dialogue also proffers a temporally-oriented explanation of communicative behavior which takes into account the historicity of all communicative acts. Rather than predicting the interaction of future decision making groups, a critical theory of dialogue yields a means (1) to assess current decision making and (2) to anticipate the direction of future decision making.” [Grant T. Savage, “A Critical Theory of Dialogue: A Review and Critique of Habermas’ Theory of Universal Pragmatics and Implications for Theories of Decision Making and Negotiation.” Presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association. Honolulu, Hawaʿi. May 23rd–27th, 1985. Pages 1-27. Retrieved on October 2nd, 2016.]

“The theoretical foundation for this study is the Interact System Model.… Briefly, the ISM [Interact System Model] uses the propositions of modern system theory as a model of communication …. The most basic structural unit is the act, i.e., one uninterrupted verbal utterance.… Communication occurs in a social system and order in the system is defined by predictably occurring sequences of interaction Consequently, relationships emerge and are defined within an interactive context. Communication is the basis for relationship definition.” [Donald George Ellis. An Analysis of Relational Communication in Ongoing Group Systems. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Utah. Salt Lake City, Utah. August, 1976. Page 20.]

“Emancipatory social science, in its broadest terms, seeks to generate knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging human oppression and creating the conditions in which people can live flourishing lives. To call it a social science, rather than social criticism or philosophy, is to recognize the importance for this task of systematic scientific knowledge about how the world works. To call it emancipatory is to identify its central moral purpose—the elimination of oppression, and the creation of conditions for human flourishing. And to call it social implies a belief that emancipation depends upon the transformation of the social world, not just the inner self. To fulfil its mission, any emancipatory social science faces three basic tasks: first, to elaborate a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; second, to envision viable alternatives; and third, to understand the obstacles, possibilities and dilemmas of transformation. In different historical moments one or another of these may be more pressing than others, but all are necessary for a comprehensive emancipatory theory.” [Erik Olin Wright, “Compass Points: Towards a Socialist Alternative.” New Left Review. Series II, number 41, September–October 2006. Pages 93-124.]

“This article analyses [Félix] Guattari’s and [Bruno] Latour’s bodies of work as radical developers of a processual and ontological transdisciplinarity.…

“… It will be understood that the insistence on ‘the machination producing the existent, the generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity’ …, the very notion of a ‘non-human enunciation’ and the plane of machinic interfaces from which ‘Being crystallizes through an infinity of enunciative assemblages’ …, calls into question all disciplinary boundaries, shortcircuited now by the formula PROCESSUAL MONISM = PLURALISM OF ASSEMBLAGES.…

“… Collectively translated and redesigned, the ‘magic formula’ PLURALISM = MONISM presents itself as a kind of politics of transdisciplinarity in which each discipline, while extending and testing the entities it mobilizes, enters into an inter-problematization of the modes of assembling its assemblages, liberated from the modern meta-language of the epistemological bifurcation human/non-human, or, more classically, nature/culture (or nature/knowledge, following [Alfred North] Whitehead’s deconstruction of ‘the bifurcation of nature’).”

[Éric Alliez, “Structuralism’s Afters: Tracing Transdisciplinarity through Guattari and Latour.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 32, numbers 5–6, 2015. Pages 139-158.]

“An assemblage, the perfect object for the novel, has two sides: it is a collective assemblage of enunciation; it is a machinic assemblage of desire. Not only is [Franz] Kafka the first to dismantle these two sides, but the combination that he makes of them is a sort of signature that all readers will necessarily recognize.… [I]f the boiler room isn’t described in itself (and, anyway, the boat is in port), that is because a machine is never simply technical. Quite the contrary, it is technical only as a social machine, taking men and women into its gears, or, rather, having men and women as part of its gears along with things, structures, metals, materials. Even more, Kafka doesn’t think only about the conditions of alienated, mechanized labor—he knows all about that in great, intimate detail—but his genius is that he considers men and women to be part of the machine not only in their work but even more so in their adjacent activities, in their leisure, in their loves, in their protestations, in their indignations, and so on.” [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Dana Polan, translator. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1986. Page 81.]

“… literary universals are properties and relations that are found across a range of genetically and geographically distinct literatures, which is to say literatures that have arisen and developed separately at least with respect to those properties and relations.…

“The maximization of unobtrusive patterning and the relationships among rehearsal memory, line length, and aesthetic experience provide clear illustrations of what will necessarily be two central types of descriptive and explanatory study in a theory of literary universals. However, they are mere starting points for research, hypotheses to be modified, elaborated, and perhaps replaced. Again, the study of literary universals, like the study of linguistic universals, is a project that can progress only through the cooperative efforts of a broad range of researchers engaged in an ongoing process of empirical reevaluation of theories and theoretical reorientation of empirical research.”

[Patrick Colm Hogan, “Literary Universals.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Lisa Zunshine, editor. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Pages 37-60.]

“I advance the thesis that SR [social responsibility] has emancipatory ends, of meeting human needs and flourishing, and that it is best explicated using feminist care ethics. The argument is then focussed on both shoring up and advancing the emancipatory project of SR.…

“… The scientific ontological approach locates the sort of responsibility SR refers to and why.…

“… The scientific ontological analysis makes clear that the drawing together of the social with responsibility reveals something particular about the kind of responsibility involved. We have seen that to volunteer to be socially responsible is to acknowledge that there are other’s needs to be met.…

“Recalling the differentiation between the social scientific and social philosophical projects is important. It highlights how a scientific ontological analysis of the kind being undertaken here is focussed on the development of the actual existent.”

[Helen Mussell, “The Nature of Social Responsibility: Exploring Emancipatory Ends.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 2, June 2017. Pages 222-243.]

“… [This article features] a systematic, multiperspectival discussion of ontology and its language of being and the challenges an ‘ontological eye’ presents for the theory and practice of existential psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy.…

“… the purpose of this paper is to rekindle interest in developing systematic, ontological foundations for existential psychotherapy. I begin by reflecting on what it means to be an existential psychotherapist before explicating how I understand ontology and the science and language of being. A critical review of historical factors contributing to the ‘de-ontologizing’ of American existential psychology then follows before concluding with a succinct consideration of existential psychotherapy’s present standing.”

[Erik Craig, “The Lost Language of Being: Ontology’s Perilous Destiny in Existential Psychotherapy.” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology: PPP. Volume 22, number 2, June 2015. Pages 79-92.]

“Findings highlight the critical psychotherapy experiences for clients, based upon robust findings across these research studies. Process-focused principles for practice are generated that can enrich therapists’ understanding of their clients in key clinical decision-making moments. Based upon these findings, an agenda is suggested in which research is directed toward heightening therapists’ understanding of clients and recognizing them as agents of change within sessions, supporting the client as self-healer paradigm. This research aims to improve therapists’ sensitivity to clients’ experiences and thus can expand therapists’ attunement and intentionality in shaping interventions in accordance with whichever theoretical orientation is in use. The article advocates for the full integration of the qualitative literature in psychotherapy research in which variables are conceptualized in reference to an understanding of clients’ experiences in sessions.…

“… In particular, the studies found that clients benefited when the therapist helped the client challenge negative and self-critical thoughts, and encouraged and coconstructed with the client a new and more affirming sense of self.”

[Heidi M. Levitt, Andrew Pomerville, and Francisco I. Surace, “A qualitative meta-analysis examining clients’ experiences of psychotherapy: A new agenda.” Psychological Bulletin. Volume 142, number 8, August 2016. Pages 801-830.]

“Occupy’s position as a leaderless movement has left it open to a dynamic that I call ‘gender ventriloquism’ …, which positions Occupy as a unitary subject that has no voice and does not speak for itself. Ventriloquism is the production of the voice in such a way that it seems to come from a source other than the vocal cords of the speaker.… [There is a] production of knowledge that effectively claims to speak for, represent, or be based on the experience of the subaltern, without the subaltern representing herself, in contributing to the knowledge. The politics of speaking for others, including on the part of academics, has been the subject of much academic work, particularly by feminists.…

“… [This situation] positions Occupy, like women in some psychoanalytic theory, as not speaking for itself, as needing someone outside, a male expert, to speak for it. In this way the question feminizes Occupy.”

[Nan Seuffert, “Occupy, Financial Fraternity and Gender Ventriloquism.” Law, Culture and the Humanities. Volume 10, number 3, Octobre 2014. Pages 380-396.]

“Viewing socialism and communism as moral evils, Catholic clergy assailed radical ideas [in Ireland] and snuffed out social progress, throwing their considerable weight behind policies and campaigns designed to marginalize leftists on the island. It called for the expulsion of radicals; organized surveillance of communists; and in response to growth of radicalism internationally, supported repressive Catholic regimes like [Francisco] Franco’s Spain.

“Today, the same Church has seen its power greatly reduced — presenting, it seems, new opportunities for the long-beleaguered Irish left.”

[Gerald Madden, “Defending the Faith: The Catholic Church waged a century-long war against the Irish left.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 21, spring 2016. Pages 57-63.]

“Critical Data Studies (CDS) explore the unique cultural, ethical, and critical challenges posed by Big Data. Rather than treat Big Data as only scientifically empirical and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that Big Data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages. Assemblages is a concept that helps capture the multitude of ways that already-composed data structures inflect and interact with society, its organization and functioning, and the resulting impact on individuals’ daily lives. CDS questions the many assumptions about Big Data that permeate contemporary literature on information and society by locating instances where Big Data may be naively taken to denote objective and transparent informational entities.…

“… CDs [critical data studies] might offend researchers who point out that all forms of research are critical and create a false separation between critical theory and data science. As such, CDS continues to remain an inclusive field that is open to self-critique and dialog, itself politicized in its quest to politicize Big Data. At the very least, the amorphous groups of individuals, texts, projects, and institutions that seek a specific and pronounced critical engagement with Big Data science now have a name to use.”

[Andrew Iliadis and Federica Russo, “Critical data studies: An introduction.” Big Data & Society. July–December 2016. Pages 1-7.]

“The historical realization of consciously pursued substantive equality is of course dependent on the actual production of its material conditions in the most comprehensive sense. The advocacy of the realization of such a monumental historical achievement could be only a wishful ‘ought-to-be’ if its conditions would have to be postulated in the form of ‘Divine Grace’ or the deed of some mysterious ‘World Spirit,’ as we find so much of historical development projected in the idealist philosophical conceptions of the past.

“But in actuality this is not the case with regard the question of substantive equality. For the human natural ground of the unfolding historical process toward the realization of substantive equality is itself material precisely in the most comprehensive sense in which all human beings objectively share the communality of their fundamental natural substratum, with its most varied creative potentiality.”

[István Mészáros, “From Primitive to Substantive Equality—via Slavery.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 4, September 2016. Pages 33-55.]

“‘Postmarxisms’ regularly emerge at those moments in which capitalism itself undergoes a structural metamorphosis.…

“Discursive struggle (as opposed to outright ideological conflict) succeeds by way of discrediting its alternatives and rendering unmentionable a whole series of thematic topics.…

“Social revolution is not a moment in time, but it can be affirmed in terms of the necessity of change in what is a synchronic system, in which everything holds together and is interrelated with everything else.…

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was not due to the failure of communism but rather to the success of communism, provided one understands this last, as the West generally does, as a mere strategy of modernization.…

“The Marxisms (the political movements as well as the forms of intellectual and theoretical resistance) that emerge from the present system of late capitalism, from postmodernity … will necessarily be distinct from those that developed during the modern period, the second stage, the age of imperialism.”

[Fredric Jameson, “Five theses on actually existing Marxism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 47, issue 11, April 1996. Pages 1-8.]

“… dual power will be my political program and will lead to my utopian proposal.

“The phrase is, of course, associated with [Vladimir] Lenin and his description of the coexistence of the provisional government and the network of soviets, or workers’ and soldiers’ councils, in 1917—a genuine transitional period if there ever was one— but it has also existed in numerous other forms of interest to us today. I would most notably single out the way organizations like the Black Panthers yesterday or Hamas [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, حَمَاس, Ḥamās, ‘fortitude’ or ‘enthusiasm’] today function to provide daily services—food kitchens, garbage collection, health care, water inspection, and the like— in areas neglected by some official central government. (If you like current Foucauldian jargon, you might describe this as a tension or even an opposition between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘governmentality.’) In such situations, power moves to the networks to which people turn for practical help and leadership on a daily basis: in effect, they become an alternate government, without officially challenging the ostensibly legal structure. The point at which a confrontation and a transfer take place, at which the official government begins to ‘wither away,’ a point at which revolutionary violence appears, will of course vary with the overall political and cultural context itself.”

[Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia.” An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. Slavoj Žižek, editor. 2016. Pages 1-96.]

“… competitiveness, or the ideology of competition, is used to justify the decisions and actions of firms, especially when the outcomes adversely affect some people, groups, and classes. Historically, the concept of competitiveness has been used to justify business opposition to unions, reduced hours of work, wage increases, paid vacations, health and safety regulations, antipollution laws, and so on.” [James Rinehart, “The ideology of competitiveness.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 47, issue 5, October 1995. Pages 14-23.]

“Narrowly defined, the Green Revolution is the rapid growth in Third World grain output associated with the introduction of a new package of tropical agricultural inputs. The package consists essentially of a combination of improved grain varieties, mainly rice and wheat, heavy fertilizer usage and carefully controlled irrigation. Without fertilizer or without controlled irrigation the new varieties usually yield no more and sometimes less than traditional strains. With them they give substantially higher yields per acre.…

“For radicals in the developed countries there is at least one lesson. The Green Revolution provides a striking illustration of how imperialist intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, can have far-reaching negative effects on the Third World. The problem of hunger in the capitalist world has rarely been one of absolute food deficits, particularly when the productive capacity of the developed countries is taken into account. It is one of uneven distribution caused by a system that feeds those with money and, unless forced to do otherwise, lets the rest fend for themselves.”

[Harry M. Cleaver, Jr., “The Contradictions of the Green Revolution.” The American Economic Review. Volume 62, number 1/2, March 1972. Pages 177-186.]

“The underlying assumption …—[of] what can be termed the model of ‘virtual capitalism’ offered by business—is that the main information providers, as well as the main collecting centers for information, on the information super-highway will be the large communications and entertainment firms. Within this context of corporate dominated capitalism, ‘the information highway,’ [Microsoft’s Bill] Gates informs us, ‘will allow those who produce goods to see, a lot more efficiently than ever before, what buyers want, and will allow potential consumers to buy those goods more efficiently.‘ It is this increased efficiency in selling and buying that more than anything else constitutes the ideal of ‘friction-free capitalism.’” [Michael Dawson and John Foster Bellamy, “Virtual capitalism: The political economy of the information highway.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 48, issue 3, July/August 1996. Pages 40-59.]

“The conscious adoption and successful maintenance of the orienting principle of self-critique is an absolutely fundamental requirement of the historically sustainable hegemonic alternative to capital’s social metabolic order as an organic system.…

“The qualitatively different organic system of labor’s necessary hegemonic alternative to the established mode of social metabolic reproduction is unthinkable without the conscious espousal of self-critique as its vital orienting principle.”

[István Mészáros, “The Communal System and the Principle of Self-Critique.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 59, issue 10, March 2008. Pages 33-56.]

“In this paper, we propose a transition from the traditional static approach to a dynamic approach. Instead of only comparing the wholeness with its parts statically, this dynamic approach focuses on how and why new properties become emergent, as well as how and why emergent wholes or emergent patterns arise. We call this approach the dynamics of emergence. It can be divided into two parts. The first part discusses the micro-dynamics of emergence, focusing on the question of self-organization. In this part, we will examine mechanisms of lower-level components from which emergence of systems arises, including micro-micro (action-formational) mechanisms and micro–macro (action-transformational) mechanisms. The second part discusses the macrodynamics or environment dynamics of emergence, focusing on questions of adaptation and selective evolution. In this part, we will examine mechanisms of the environment from which emergence arises, including macro-micro (downward) mechanisms and macro-macro mechanisms.” [Zhang Huaxia, “Exploring Dynamics of Emergence.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science. Volume 24, number 4, July–August 2007. Pages 431-443.]

“This article … gestures towards a somewhat ambitious project as a contribution to further developing cultural sociology: a reconstructive reconciliation between the ‘sociological’ legacies of Frankfurt critical theory and cultural studies.…

“I would suggest an aesthetic public sphere perspective might invite the following research agenda for a cultural sociology:

[Paul Jones, “Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere.” Cultural Sociology. Volume 1, number 1, March 2007. Pages 73-95.]

“Women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere, whereas female readers as well as apprentices and servants often took a more active part in the literary public sphere than the owners of private property and family heads themselves. Yet in the educated classes the one form of public sphere was considered to be identical with the other; in the self-understanding of public opinion the public sphere appeared as one and indivisible.” [Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence, translators. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1991. Page 56.]

“As part of a larger ethnographic research project, this article analyses the history of memorialization on the First World War Gallipoli battlefields and its relationship with international travel and tourism.… A cultural sociology of the public sphere is proposed as a way of comprehending such tourism, one that avoids assumptions about the severing of meaningful cultural ties with the events and institutions of modernity.…

“Where [Jürgen] Habermas … largely conceived of the public sphere as a historical entity driven by communicative rationality, I draw on recent cultural scholarship that has theorized it in more universal terms as a zone where the central value system of a society is emotionally debated and ritually contested ….

[Brad West, “Dialogical Memorialization, International Travel and the Public Sphere: A Cultural Sociology of Commemoration and Tourism at the First World War Gallipoli Battlefields.” Tourist Studies. Volume 10, number 3, 2010. Pages 209-225.]

“In this paper, I shall try to articulate and illustrate some important issues that mark the movement beyond the terms of the disputes between internalists and social constructivists. For convenience, I adopt the phrase ‘cultural studies of scientific knowledge’ to refer to this quite heterogeneous body of scholarship in history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, feminist theory, and literary criticism. In using such a term, it is crucial to keep in mind that it cuts across some very important theoretical differences, including some significant scholarly work taking place across the very boundaries I am articulating between cultural studies and the social constructivist tradition. My aim is not to reify cultural studies, but to highlight some important issues which might reshape the terms of interdisciplinary science studies.” [Joseph Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations. Volume 1, 1992. Pages 1-22.]

“The real challenge in cultural studies of drug and alcohol use is to theorise intoxication itself. Radical constructivists tend to associate intoxication with culture and socialisation: conventions, labels and rituals determine how substances are used and how their effects are experienced. On the other hand, intoxicants obviously work on the human body and have ‘natural effects’ on the mind independently of cultural factors.…

“… approaches that look for functions that alcohol or drugs satisfy tend to stress variations in the societal contexts or individual needs and motives, sometimes focusing on intoxication but often looking mostly at other things. Anthropological studies have analysed the functions of alcohol and drug use in the ritual systems of small, often non-Western societies. They reveal important variability in the way alcohol or drugs are used in different cultural contexts ….”

[Pekka Sulkunen, “Between culture and nature: Intoxication in cultural studies of alcohol and drug use.” Contemporary Drug Problems. Volume 29, number 2, summer 2002. Pages 253-276.]

“In the mid-1990s several articles appeared in the dance literature calling for a greater alliance between dance scholarship and cultural studies. More recently, dance scholarship has come to be labeled ‘dance studies,’ suggesting that such a link has occurred. Since interdisciplinarity is a key element of cultural studies, it is appropriate to investigate interdisciplinarity in dance studies by examining dance’s relationship to cultural studies. This genealogical task, though, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Cultural studies’ relationship to the disciplines has not been stable over its half-century of existence. Interdisciplinarity, tied so closely to cultural studies’ idea of its own freedom and political mission, has proved difficult to hang onto—so difficult, in fact, that today some consider the field to be in crisis.” [Gay Morris, “Dance Studies/Cultural Studies.” Dance Research Journal. Volume 41, number 1, summer 2009. Pages 82-100.]

“The cultural-identity theory acknowledges this relationship between identity (e.g., drug-related identities) and behavior (drug abuse). It speculates that drug related identification may ultimately distinguish drug use from drug abuse. Future empirical work seeks to determine if drug-related identity change mediates the relationship between such behaviors. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the drives toward drug abuse and my offer new approaches to drug abuse prevention strategies.” [Tammy L. Anderson, “A Cultural-Identity Theory of Drug Abuse.” Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance. Volume 1. Pages 233-262.]

“Although there is ambiguity over mission and purpose of the community college …, there is generally a uniform view of institutional culture, in large part because of its student population …. Yet, race and ethnicity have rarely been the basis of the cultural identity of the institution. However, as early as 1978 …, there was evidence that race and ethnicity were components of the U.S. community college’s organizational culture and played a role in organizational behaviors, particularly in the behaviors of students.” [John S. Levin, Zachary Haberler, Laurencia Walker, and Adam Jackson-Boothby, “Community College Culture and Faculty of Color.” Community College Review. Volume 42, number 1, 2014. Pages 55-74.]

“… cultural identity is one form of social identity. It is defined as ‘the emotional significance we attach to our sense of belonging or affiliation with the larger culture’ …. Further, cultural identity has two dimensions: value content and salience. Value content refers to ‘the standards or expectations that people hold in their mind-set in making evaluation.’ The value content and salience dimensions are interrelated. To illustrate, if one cultural identity is salient, people have strong associations of membership affiliation (i.e., salience), and thus they are likely to practice the norms and value patterns of the culture (i.e., value content). The more strongly our self-image is influenced by our larger cultural value patterns, the more we are likely to practice the norms and communication scripts of the dominant, mainstream culture.” [Satoshi Moriizumi, “Constructing Multifaceted Cultural Identity Theory: Beyond Dichotomization of Individualism-Collectivism.” China Media Research. Volume 7, number 2, April 2011. Pages 17-25.]

“Cultural identity theory has developed largely from a western perspective in order to examine how migrants adapt to living within or alongside another so-called dominant cultural group as illustrated in general texts ….” [Rodney C. Hills and Paul W. B. Atkins, “Cultural identity and convergence on western attitudes and beliefs in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal of Cross Cultural Management. Volume 13, number 2, 2013. Pages 193-213.]

“The transgenerational cultural identity model suggests that intergenerational transmission process may differ between immigrant generations. The model was developed based on the cultural identity theory, which assumes that individuals develop and may change their cultural identity as they go through various stages of psychological development. The integral parts of the theory include experiences of connection, differentiation, dynamics of oppression, and resiliency.” [Keitaro Yoshida and Dean M. Busby, “Intergenerational Transmission Effects on Relationship Satisfaction: A Cross-Cultural Study.” Journal of Family Issues. Volume 33, number 2, 2012. Pages 202-222.]

“The narrative data analysed in this article draws from a larger corpus of focus group interviews with Andalusian-born participants distributed into two different groups: migrants and non-migrants. These data were initially collected to examine the impact of migration experience (as an experience of alterity) in the discursive construction of cultural identity, comparing the structure and content of the arguments deployed by participants in the two groups mentioned when talking about their Andalusian identity ….” [Beatriz Macías Gómez-Estern, “Narratives of migration: Emotions and the interweaving of personal and cultural identity through narrative.” Culture & Psychology. Volume 19, number 3, 2013. Pages 348-368.]

“This paper summarizes empirical studies the author and her associates have carried out in the past decade pertaining to English language learning and cultural identity changes in China, and related criticism. In response to challenges on the legitimacy of such research regarding unified definition, cause attribution and context relevance, the paper introduces an epistemological distinction between structuralism and constructivism, which helps to clarify the issues under debate and raises questons for future research. The structuralism-constructivism distinction has implications for cultural identity studies in particular, and intercultural communication studies in general.…

“… With additive bilingualism, the native language and cultural identity are maintained while the target language and cultural identity are acquired; the two co-exist and function in different communicative situations. With productive bilingualism, the competence in native and target languages/cultures enhance each other; the learner benefits from a general cognitive and affective growth and increased creativity.”

[Yihong Gao, “Legitimacy of Foreign Language Learning and Identity Research: Structuralist and Constructivist Perspectives.” Intercultural Communication Studies. Volume XVI, number 1, 2006. Pages 100-112.]

“… we prefer the term cultural identity instead of acculturation when describing the cultural experiences of Latina/o immigrants. Cultural identity theory has its roots in a number of liberation movements such as feminism and African American consciousness movements. Theories of cultural identity are liberating because they place a particular emphasis on the expansion of personal consciousness in relation to the cultural context in which one is embedded …. Cultural identity is then understood as a “consciousness development, the generation of more complex cognitions and behaviors as one comes to see oneself in context” [José Rubén Parra-Cardona, Dean M. Busby, and Richard S. Wampler, “No Soy de Aqui ni Soy de Alla: Transgenerational Cultural Identity Formation.” Journal of Hispanic Higher Education. Volume 3, number 4, October 2004. Pages 322-337.]

“Cultural identity theory reflects the ontological assumption that individuals enact multiple cultural identities constituted in and through discourse with others. The theoretical frame of cultural identity is appropriate for this study to illustrate identifications that include many forms of group categorization.” [Kristin Moss and William V. Faux, II, “The Enactment of Cultural Identity in Student Conversations on Intercultural Topics.” The Howard Journal of Communications. Volume 17, 2006. Pages 21-37.]

“… many inter-group conflicts result in the drastic alteration or even the destruction of a particular group’s cultural identity. For example, the internal colonization of Aboriginal people, or the slavery of African Americans not only caused great personal suffering, but also succeeded in fundamentally changing the traditional cultures of these groups, and thereby the cultural identity of each and every group member. Even current tensions, such as the ongoing and complex conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, have at their root the question of a cultural or religious identity through a secure Israeli or Palestinian homeland – each group’s cultural identity may be dramatically affected depending on how the inter-group tension is played out.” [Donald M. Taylor and Esther Usborne, “When I Know Who ‘We’ Are, I Can Be ‘Me’: The Primary Role of Cultural Identity Clarity for Psychological Well-Being.” Transcultural Psychiatry. Volume 47, number 1, February 2010. Pages 93-111.]

“In what follows, we problematize the way in which the educational field has addressed the topics of cultural identity, cultural difference, and cultural community in these times of rapid globalizing change. We read such mainstream approaches to education and culture against the open possibilities of knowledge production and ethical affiliation that are foregrounded in postcolonial theory, postcolonial literature, art, and popular culture. We believe that addressing these critical issues of cultural identity and the organization of knowledge in schooling is pivotal in a time in which there are deepening patterns of cultural balkanization and disciplinary insulation in educational institutions—a product of the uncertainty precipitated by the proliferation of difference as a consequence of globalization.” [Claudia Matus and Cameron McCarthy, “The Triumph of Multiplicity and the Carnival of Difference: Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Postcolonialism and Globalization.” International Handbook of Curriculum Research. William F. Pinar, editor. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Pages 73-82.]

“Physical cultural studies, among many other social sciences, has embraced the challenge of studying the body. Many of these analyses interrogate the cultural construction of the sporting body within neoliberal societies through textual readings to demonstrate the oppressive cultural politics in the representations of physically active bodies. In addition, several ethnographic studies have examined how individuals understand, experience, and practice sport and exercise. While these scholars have critiqued sport and argued for more empowering practices that potentially transform the way sport and physical activity currently subjugate individuals, there is much less work on how to provide practical tools for such transgression. Despite the need for social change in sport and exercise, such pragmatic explorations as critical pedagogy remain almost unexplored within physical cultural studies.” [Pirkko Markula, “Affect[ing] Bodies: Performative Pedagogy of Pilates.” International Review of Qualitative Research. Volume 1, number 3, fall 2008. Pages 381-408.]

“… we contend that ‘any discussion concerning the imperatives of, and for, physical cultural studies starts (and perhaps ends) along the articulatory axes of politics and practice; and, more specifically, the body—of researcher and researched alike6—as locus of politics and praxis’ …. As such, we suggest that we would do well to begin thinking about the research act of [physical] cultural studies as necessarily being ‘an embodied activity’ ….” [Michael D. Giardina and Joshua I. Newman, “Physical Cultural Studies and Embodied Research Acts.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 11, number 6, 2011. Pages 223-234.]

“This analysis shows that first-generation Caribbean-Canadians’ sporting experiences cannot be read only in relation to the dominant White Canadian group, discourses of racism in sport, or understandings of Afro-Caribbean ‘routes’ or travel experiences. Moreover, globalization and transnationality paradigms do not help us to fully understand the geographic, social, and cultural flows described in this paper. Interactions between diasporic groups in the place of dwelling frame the meanings that are made in recreational sport. A diaspora approach to physical cultural studies is necessary to understand these relationships.” [Janelle Joseph, “Culture, community, consciousness: The Caribbean sporting diaspora.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport. Volume 49, number 6. 2014. Pages 669-687.]

“At its heart, the New Materialism explores the potentially actant qualities of the material and non-human world—New Materialism then is interested in relations between things, objects, phenomena, materialities, and physical bodies, as well as the relations between those things (things with each other) and humans (humans with things). New Materialism also considers the thingness of the human, the materiality of human bodies, and explores consciousness, feeling, affect, and other circulatory and shared social phenomena as they rise out of the substance of the world. Therefore, much New Materialist thought thinks through and with the biological and chemical make-up of the neurological body itself in relation to an increasingly toxic but always-chemical world.

“Given these interests, the New Materialism is also interested in speculating about a world in which the human subject is not centered, or even central. The timeliness of this concern, for a species quickly headed towards and in fact already mired in ecological disaster and multiple-species genocide, cannot be over-emphasized. In some New Materialist thinking, particularly the strains of queer of color critique rethinking the relationship between racialized humans and the animal, the current planetary crisis is above all a consequence of the human-centered logic that underlies modern Christological racial capitalism, a logic that produces categories of beings designated as animal or object, in the name of extracting value and labor-energy.”

[Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Issue 5.1, spring 2016. Creative Commons. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The ‘new materialism’ is the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics.…

“Appreciation of the fragility of things requires cultivation of greater sensitivity to multiple ways in which contemporary institutions, role definitions and nonhuman processes intersect. Such emergent sensitivities, however, are often linked to a cautious politics of modest change.”

[William E. Connolly, “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 3, 2013. Pages 399-412.]

“Class relations are evidently central to any understanding of material inequalities. However, New Materialism does not provide a complete picture of what neoliberalism and austerity looks like. Indeed, in many respects, the ‘New’ Materialism, looks very like ‘old’ variants of Marxism, which at once acknowledge that marginalisation, poverty and suffering has a female face and also an ethnic or racial dimension, yet continue to insist that the reasons for this are not to be found in capitalism and the economic realm per se, but must be sought elsewhere, thus alleviating the need to engage with gender, ethnicity or race in any serious way. There are political choices and consequences attendant upon the marginalisation of gender, ethnicity and race, which are pertinent for understanding and responding to current developments. With respect to gender specifically, the New Materialism debate needs to generate an adequate theory of social relations, production, social reproduction and oppression, in order for its revival to be successful.” [Daniela Tepe-Belfrage and Jill Steans, “The new materialism: Re-claiming a debate from a feminist perspective.” Capital & Class. Volume 40, number 2, 2016. Pages 303-324.]

“There is a good reason why a book on new materialism is written now. In recent years new materialism has proven to be capable of opposing the transcendental and humanist traditions that are haunting cultural theory, standing on the brink of the post-postmodern era. Of course dualist traditions are stubborn and have buried themselves deep in the minds of (common-sense) scholars today. These traditions continue to stir debates, which are being opened up by new materialists (think of the feminist polemic about the failed materialism in the work of Judith Butler …, and of the Saussurian/Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies …, which as Karen Barad … has shown, have prevented the theorization of ‘agential matter’ from being effectuated). But at the start of the 21ˢᵗ century, this new materialist ambition does seem to offer a more than equal alternative for scholars working in the humanities and beyond. Perhaps for the first time in its history, this “minor tradition” in thinking (as Gilles Deleuze would label it) is getting the attention it needs, freeing itself from the Platonist, Christian, and Modernist rule under which it suffered for so long.” [Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press imprint of Michigan Publishing. 2012. Creative Commons. Pages 94-95.]

“… research, often characterized as ‘new materialist,’ has staged a return/turn to such objects as ‘the body,’ ‘nature,’ and ‘life’ in social and critical theory by bringing ‘matter’ into the purview of our research. We see this attention to matter emerging across disciplines and interdisciplines in neurofeminist engagements with the molecular, ecofeminist theories of the anthropocene, and posthumanist treatments of the coevolution of human and nonhuman animals. Matter generally takes the form of scientific data on bodies and climates and that data become the object around which curiosity circulates and out of which new—materialist—feminist theories emerge. In this article, I demonstrate the limitations of such research ….” [Angela Willey, “A World of Materialisms: Postcolonial Feminist Science Studies and the New Natural.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. OnlineFirst edition. July, 2016. Pages 1-24.]

“New materialist approaches to cultural studies have developed from a number of directions: via engagements with phenomenology, with Walter Benjamin’s work on the ‘petrified objects’ of the late nineteenth century, with [Martin] Heidegger’s theory of the thing, with [Gilles] Deleuze, and with actor-network theory (especially the work of Bruno Latour). These kinds of materialism are very varied and in some ways incompatible with one another.” [Michelle Henning, “The pig in the bath: New materialisms and cultural studies.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 145, September/October 2007. Pages 11-19.]

“… the New Materialisms have been integral to the political turn in contemporary theory. More to the point, a growing number of Continental thinkers have consolidated around the argument for how the post-metaphysical, deconstructive approach to politics is lacking in a sufficient concept of the political. This has contributed to the burgeoning discourse in political theology that critically engages the significance of Carl Schmitt’s work as one of the first sustained and most far-ranging critiques of modern liberalism. But whereas Schmitt’s concept of the political rests on the friend-enemy distinction that restores the centrality of sovereignty in accordance with the uniform logic of the one, and as such is seen by many as dangerously antagonistic and at odds with the insights and commitments that have emerged from the political philosophies in the deconstructive, post-metaphysical mode, the New Materialisms provide a basis for an alternative concept of the political.” [Jeffrey W. Robbins, “Renewing Materialism: Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala and the Hermeneutical Option for the Poor.” Philosophy Today. Volume 60, issue 3, summer 2016. Pages 687-702.]

“I propose here a ‘new materialist’ approach to world politics derived from Marx’s critical political economy. I then apply it to the issue of ‘global governance,’ exploring in particular the global role proposed for itself by the World Bank, in partnership with the IMF. The focus is on the ‘governance of global capitalism,’ as reflected in the efforts of the two institutions both to develop a set of operating principles and practices for a competitive global capitalist economy and for individual states within it, and to promote and supervise their institutionalisation across the world. Drawing on core concepts from Marxist political economy – primitive accumulation, capitalist accumulation, the reserve army of labour, hegemony and relative autonomy – I show that there is an explicit project at the heart of recent World Bank-IMF activity, aimed at the ‘completion of the world market’ and the global imposition of the social relations and disciplines central to capitalist reproduction. This is pursued through the promotion of a ‘sound’ macro-economic framework, along with structural reforms – national and global liberalisation, and privatisation – and associated regulatory innovations.” [Paul Cammack, “The Governance of Global Capitalism: A New Materialist Perspective.” Historical Materialism. Volume 11, number 2, 2003. Pages 37-59.]

“This book has a philosophical project and, related to it, a political one. The philosophical project is to think slowly an idea that runs fast through modern heads: the idea of matter as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert. This habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) is a ‘partition of the sensible,’ to use Jacques Ranciere’s phrase. The quarantines of matter and life encourage US to ignore the Vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane as we speak. I will turn the ligures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange, in something like the way a common word when repeated can become a foreign, nonsense sound. In the space created by this estrangement, a vital materiality can start to take shape.” [Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2010. Page vii.]

“Dogged resistance to anthropocentrism is perhaps the main difference between the vital materialism I pursue and this kind of historical materialism. I will emphasize, even overemphasize, the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces (operating in nature, in the human body, and in human artifacts) in an attempt to cqunter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism — the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature — to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.” [Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2010. Page xvi.]

“Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and well-being in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south.…

“Here, we contribute to debates in new materialism by maintaining that assumptions driving the QSW [quantified self at work] rely on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contemporary research on quantified bodies from new materialist approaches draw on both Marxist and poststructuralist authors ….”

[Phoebe Moore, “The quantified self: What counts in the neoliberal workplace.” New Media & Society. Volume 18, number 11, 2016. Pages 2774-2792.]

“Following the insights of Noam Yuran, we see that the neo-materialistic economy is one in which symbols behave like materials (for Yuran, brands are actually commodities made of money). This helps us to understand how brands and labels are regarded as material objects (the criteria of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ in brands, for example) or how labor has shifted from production to consumption (tourism, shopping, entertainment, watching television, advertisements, and social networks).” [Joshua Simon, “Neo-Materialism, Part Two: The Unreadymade.” e-flux. New York. Issue 23, March 2011. Retrieved on October 8th, 2015.]

“Neomaterialism is a blog run by Joshua Simon, curator and writer and a 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellow at the New School, who is researching expanded notions of Thingness.

“The aim of this blog is to examine the order of things today. How come symbols behave like materials (‘fake’ and ‘real’ brands)? Why have commodities become the historical subject (do we furnish our world with IKEA [a furniture and accessories store] or rather we dwell in its world)? Are humans reduced to simply absorbing surpluses (with baby diapers being a form of child labor)? How labor has shifted from production to consumption? Why is everything we do is work (even when we are not employed) and how can a generation overqualified for the labor market can change everything?…

“Re-introducing different notions of dialectical materialism into the already established conversation on the subjectivity of things, Neomaterialism challenges the investigation which the new-materialists have begun, relating it to labor, debt, credit, animisim and alienation, life-taxes and social organization.

“With the book Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), available in stores now the blog also operates as an ongoing archive for references, reviews and events.”

[Joshua Simon. Neomaterialism. Blog. Undated. Retrieved on October 8th, 2015.]

“The most compelling materialist theories of art have to do precisely with this sense that art is a metaphorical expression of the hard historical facts of economic life, with which it advances in tandem.…

“Some version of allegorical materialism seems to be the most compelling interpretative strategy available to us at the present time, as it is capable both of accounting for the intuitively felt relationship of necessity between economic activity and artistic production—an artist who has nothing to eat cannot live to make art; art develops together with social and technological changes—and of elucidating the content of artworks across the range of media and the spectrum of high and low culture.…

[Jacob Emery, “Art of the Industrial Trace.” New Left Review. Series II, number 71, September–October 2011. Pages 117-133.]

“In the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ‘critical theory’ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early [Max] Horkheimer through to ‘middle period’ [Jürgen] Habermas). On the other hand it has come to denote a far broader but nonetheless discrete tradition, with its roots in [Karl] Marx, [Friedrich] Nietzsche, [Sigmund] Freud and [Ferdinand de] Saussure, and its primary manifestations in France in the period from the late 1950s to the end of the 1990s, with [Roland] Barthes, [Jacques] Lacan, [Louis] Althusser, [Michel] Foucault, [Jacques] Derrida and [Jean-François] Lyotard as its main representatives. In the first case, the phrase is both self-designating and the object of explicit theoretical reflection. In the latter case, however, it was the result of the reception of a theoretically heterogeneous tradition into the literary departments of the Anglo-American academy, where ‘criticism’ was an established professional activity.” [Peter Osborne, “Spheres of action: Art and politics.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 137, May/June 2006. Page 13.]

“I will also stress issues of embodiment and make a plea for different forms of thinking about and representing the body. I will refer to this in terms of ‘radical immanence.’ This means that I want to think through the body, not in a flight away from it. This in turn implies confronting boundaries and limitations. In thinking about the body I refer to the notion of enfleshed or embodied materialism (I use the two interchangeably).” [Rosi Braidotti. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2002. Page 5.]

“The key term here is ‘radical immanence,’ that is to say a deeply embedded vision of the embodied subject. As a materialist theory it can provide an answer in so far as it encompasses the body at all levels, also, and maybe especially, the biological one. In the light of contemporary genetics and molecular biology, it is more than feasible to speak of the body as a complex system of self-sustaining forces.” [Rosi Braidotti. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2002. Page 63.]

“Given that in the materialist philosophy of immanence that I favour there is only one matter – and it is enfleshed or embodied – the process of becoming is a transformation in terms of a qualitative increase (in speed, intensity, perception or colour) that allows one to break into new fields of perception, affectivity, becoming; nothing short of a metamorphosis.” [Rosi Braidotti. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2002. Page 147.]

“Rosi Braidotti was born in Italy but grew up in Australia, therefore, having double-nationality. It was in Canberra Australia, in 1977 where she started her formative years at the Australian National University, having been awarded with the University medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyward Prize. She did her PHD in Philosophy at Sorbonne in 1981. In 1988 she was nominated Professor at University of Utrecht in Holland and she took on the position of Founding Director of the Dutch School of Women’s Studies, an assignment she carried out until the year of 2005. Braidotti was a pioneer in the studies of European women and she has been considered a world reference in gender studies and critical theory. Her research areas straddle the fields of continental philosophy and epistemology, combining feminist and gender theories and post-structuralist thought.” [Helena Ferreira, “Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.” Review article. Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais. Volume 3, number 1, 2015. Pages 399-403.]

“Transformative Ethics …

“… transformative processes … not only rework the consciousness of social injustice and discrimination but also produce a more adequate cartography of our real-life condition, free of delusions of grandeur. It is an enriching and positive experience which, however, includes pain as an integral element. Migrants, exiles, refugees have first-hand experience of the extent to which the process of disidentification from familiar identities is linked to the pain of loss and uprooting. Diasporic subjects of all kinds express the same sense of wound.…

“… [The] turning of the tide of negativity is the transformative process of achieving freedom of understanding through the awareness of our limits, of our bondage. This results in the freedom to affirm one’s essence as joy, through encounters and minglings with other bodies, entities, beings, and forces. Ethics means faithfulness to this potentia, or the desire to become.”

[Rosi Braidotti, “Affirmation versus Vulnerability: On Contemporary Ethical Debates.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Volume 10, number 1, spring 2006. Pages 235-254.]

“A primary task for posthuman critical theory … is to draw accurate and precise cartographies for these different subject positions as spring-boards towards posthuman recompositions of a pan-human cosmopolitan bond.” [Rosi Braidotti. The Posthuman. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2013. Page 41.]

“My working definition of a posthuman scientific method in the Humanities as well as in the Life sciences cannot be dissociated from an ethics of inquiry that demands respect for the complexities of the real-life world we are living in. Posthuman critical theory needs to apply a new vision of subjectivity to both the practice and the public perception of the scientist, which is still caught in the classical and outmoded model of the humanistic ‘Man of reason’ … as the quintessential European citizen. We need to overcome this model and move towards an intensive form of interdisciplinarity, transversality, and boundary-crossings among a range of discourses. This transdisciplinary approach affects the very structure of thought and enacts a rhizomatic embrace of conceptual diversity in scholarship. The posthuman method amounts to higher degrees of disciplinary hybridization and relies on intense de-familiarization of our habits of thought through encounters that shatter the flat repetition of the protocols of institutional reason.” [Rosi Braidotti. The Posthuman. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2013. Pages 119.]

“… [Rosi] Braidotti — a key figure in contemporary discussions about feminism, gender and the ‘new materialisms’ …—repeatedly stresses that the aim of her book is to develop an affirmative form of critical theory which, by providing creative alternatives to current arrangements, will allow us to better face various contemporary socio-political challenges. This means, at a more concrete level, that it proposes a ‘critical’ variety of posthumanism as a way of escaping from ‘the seemingly endless polemic between Humanism and anti-humanism.’” [Michiel van Ingen, “Beyond The Nature/Culture Divide? The Contradictions of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 5, 2016. Pages 530-542.]

“[Rosi] Braidotti is consistently open throughout the book about her own position within the debates surrounding humanism and refuses to simplify the controversies, lingering within the contradictions rather than attempting to artificially resolve them. To anyone familiar with this thorny area of study, this subtle representation is certainly to her credit. However, whilst her attention to the paradoxes of posthumanism, and her frank acknowledgement that ‘it is one thing to loudly announce an anti-humanist stance, quite another to act accordingly with even a modicum of consistency,’ is commendable, too often the reader is left with a sense that the theoretical project she is proposing is condemned to the futile efforts of a shadow attempting to flee its object.” [Marcus Morgan, “The Posthuman.” Sociology. Review article. Volume 48, number 1, February 2014. Pages 203-204.]

“My starting point is that the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. This statement has an important corollary – namely that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, and hence also multiple forms of accountability.” [Rosi Braidotti, “In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 25, number 6, November 2008. Pages 1-24.]

“Approaches to textual analysis can be differentiated according to the level(s) at which they constitute text as an object of study. From a linguistic perspective, text can be viewed as the realization of language in coherent, contextually interpretable speech.…

“… The basic shift in performance studies consists in displacing the primary object of textual analysis from linguistic form to the actualization of form in a public display. These studies are all marked by a commitment to close description of performance events, focusing on socially specific criteria for evaluation, the variability of different renditions, the engagement of a socially structured audience, and especially the distinctive responsibility of the performer to perform with mastery.”

[W. F. Hanks, “Text and Textuality.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Volume 18, 1989. Pages 95-127.]

“Queer Vitalism

“This essay is about vitalism and the apparent ethical urgency of returning to the problem of life. This urgency of the turn to life, I will argue, far from being a recent, radical and necessarily transgressive gesture, has always underpinned (and presupposed) highly normative gestures in philosophy, literature and cultural understanding. Indeed, the very notion and possibility of the normative, or the idea that one can proceed from what is (life) to what ought to be (ways of living) has always taken the form of vitalism. For the purposes of this essay, then, I will define vitalism as the imperative of grounding, defending or deriving principles and systems from life as it really is.”

[Claire Colebrook. Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press imprint of imprint of Michigan Publishing. 2014. Page 100.]

“Latin Americans never forget, and the US never remembers — an imperial amnesia that is an expression of imperial power.

“Dipesh Chakrabarty once described Europe as ‘hyperreal,’ in that the region is overdeveloped in the imagination, it’s overactive in the political imagination; you can’t talk about intellectual history or world history without talking about Europe. Latin America is hypo-real; it’s underimagined, underthought.

“And it’s not just our popular narratives that don’t consider the keystone role Latin America has played in US state formation, power projection, and national identity. Intellectuals, too, seem unable to process Latin America.

“Over the last couple of years there’s been in a resurgence in what’s known as ‘new intellectual history,’ which mostly looks at Europe and its relationship with the decolonizing world for the origins of the political categories or ideals that govern modern diplomacy: sovereignty, solidarity, nationalism, nonaggression, social rights, human rights, individual rights, and so on. But these books, almost to a one, ignore Latin America.

“In a way, Latin America is ‘unthinkable’ in much the sense that Michel-Rolph Trouillot described the Haitian Revolution. Just as the Haitian fight to end slavery and establish the second republic in the Americas was excluded, until recently, from studies of the Age of Revolution, Latin America too seems to be intellectually indigestible. Like Haiti, the region represents the promises, failures, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Enlightenment — the radical Enlightenment, in fact — in almost too vivid terms, so it’s ignored.”

[Greg Grandin, “The Empire’s Amnesia: When it comes to imperialism, Latin America never forgets, and the United States never remembers.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 25, spring 2017. Pages 35-53.]

“A key message emerging throughout the book is that urbanization is not a process that automatically delivers justice through agglomeration; instead justice is a moral compass that should guide the way we thinking about alternatives. Thus, untamed urbanisms are not about rejecting all framings – a sterile and probably impossible task – but rather about exposing the many faces that unjust urbanization has and the processes and actions that counteract them. Quite often justice in the city is equated with inclusion, the most significant achievement (in some parts of the world) of the Keynesian project of inclusive urbanism. Inclusion, however, is not the same as justice. Not only was the justice of inclusive urbanism associated with inclusion, in assuming ‘growth’ and ‘material affluence’ as the closest epigones of modernity; it also denied the significance of unjust exploitation of natural resources. If, as suggested by several contributions in this book, justice is accepted as a key value to guide both the assessment of our understanding and action, what are the governance implications? How is a commitment to justice guaranteed or ensured in a world that may have become too complex to envisage the re-assembly of strong unitary states of the kind that were built by post-WWII social democrats? How can social and environmental justice be successfully claimed if space, flows and processes within the city are strongly influenced by global actors and institutions, whereas the defense of rights largely remains within the jurisdiction of weakened national and local governments?” [Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis, and Mark Swilling, “Untamed Urbanisms: Enacting productive disruptions.” Untamed Urbanisms. Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis, and Mark Swilling, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 296-306.]

“Marxism or Communism … belongs to the Age of Competition and Conflict. The other economic ideology, viz. capitalism belongs to a still earlier epoc [sic; epoch]—that is, the Age of Exploration, and Experiment. The need of the hour is to discard both these outdated ideologies and to evolve a philosophy that can fit into the age of co-operation and interdependence. Commonism is such an ideology.” [I. P. Singh. Commonism: the Manifesto of a New Social Order. New Delhi, India: Mittal Publications. 1991. Page 7.]

“Communism and capitalism have failed to take care of the economic, social and political needs of men and women living in the age of co-operation and interdependence. The new tools of science and technology demand a new economic system on which our social order can be built.

“Such an economic system must be based on co-operation between the three main forces that go into the execution of any economic enterprise, viz. capital, labour and the society as represented by the state. Unless the assets of all economic enterprises are equally shared by entrepreneurs, workers and the state, the benefits of human endeavour cannot be extracted to the maximum extent possible. And, a planet with shrinking natural resources and a growing population cannot do with anything less than the maximum. The system in which the assets of all economic enterprises are the common property of the workers, the investors and the society as represented by the government alone can provide an answer to the problems of our times. Commonism is such a system.”

[I. P. Singh. Commonism: the Manifesto of a New Social Order. New Delhi, India: Mittal Publications. 1991. Page 10.]

“The name of this new social order is Commonism or Sajhavad in Hindi.” [I. P. Singh. Commonism: the Manifesto of a New Social Order. New Delhi, India: Mittal Publications. 1991. Page 333.]

“… [The] new philosophy is Commonism. This can also be called Co-operative Socialism or Universal Capitalism. In Hindi, it will go by the name, Sajhavad. According to this philosophy, the entire human society is a vast co-operative enterprise. Its guiding principle is not class-conflict but class co-operation. Based on this attitude, every sphere of social and economic activity should be turned into a cooperative venture. Such a transformation should be brought about not only in developing countries, but hopefully at a later date, in the entire world. At the national level, the governing principle of this ro-operation would be the joining of hands by all individuals concerned with any venture, so that the best potential of each can be realized with the help, and not at the cost, of the rest.” [I. P. Singh. Commonism: the Manifesto of a New Social Order. New Delhi, India: Mittal Publications. 1991. Pages 335.]

“Commoners and slaves frequently crossed paths, but the emerging culture of white supremacy limited the possibilities to which Magna Carta was put, though it became part of the abolitionist movement in 1770 by the Fourth of July. The settler colonies of North America, which in the seventeenth century had embraced chapter 39 of Magna Carta, united in the 1770s using Magna Carta as an example of a charter of resistance and a declaration of independence. After the eighteenth-century slave risings in the Caribbean and the mainland colonies, Magna Carta was adopted to the federal Constitution without its commonist and abolitionist meanings. These nevertheless were kept alive at the same time by the English working class in its struggle against enclosure and the factory. In general, commoning persisted where the forest remained standing.” [Peter Linebaugh. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2008. Pages 171-172.]

“Just as the Jamestown earth spread by the U.S. Army on English soil conceals the genocide of conquest, so the ABA [American Bar Association] monument conceals the commonist origin of Magna Carta and inverts its political meaning. Symbols are treacherous means of communication.” [Peter Linebaugh. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2008. Page 215.]

“The Magna Carta Manifesto … is less a history of the commons than a collection of anecdotes about common rights through the ages. It is at once global and antiquary, tight and disjointed, proceeding both by coincidental association and discovered links in a determined process. Consider, for example, his discussion of the Declaration of Independence as a ‘document of acquisition.’ To be sure, it was part of a national project that began and culminated in the expropriation of land originally settled by others; and it was, to all intents and purposes, a declaration of war as much as of independence.… That the extension of social and political liberties in the primarily English settler communities off the western north Atlantic coast, consequent upon the success of their war for independence, created a social force that overmatched the indigenous tribal peoples of the region is clear.” [Michael Merrill, “Review Essay: Commonwealth and ‘Commonism.’” International Labor and Working-Class History. Number 78, fall 2010. Pages 149-163.]

“In an anthropological spirit, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

“It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that ‘Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient oubliè de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oubliè bien des choses.’ [Now the essence of a nation is that all individuals have forgotten things in common, and also that all have forgotten many things.] With a certain ferocity [Ernest] Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’ The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates invention to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity,’ rather than to imagining and creation. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities arc to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”

[Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2006. Pages 5-6.]

“It is possible to analyze the Acehnese nationalism using one of the theories of nationalism, like the Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. However, this analysis might not explain all complexities of the Acehnese national movement, like its secular dimension and the role of religion. For this reason, the thesis will argue that the process of imaging a nation by the Acehnese was strengthen by the internal (domestic, within Indonesia) and external (international) factors influencing on-going conflict. In that sense, Anderson’s theory could explain and define what is Acehnese nationalism and nation. However, this analysis should be supported by an additional examination of internal and external dimension, which will clarify the process of shaping Acehnese nationalism.” [Karolina Szuppe. Limits of Imagined Community. The Role of Internal and External Factors in Shaping Acehnese Nationalism. M.A. thesis. Central European University. Budapest, Hungary. June, 2009. Page 7.]

“To call working class politics a form of identity politics is not, however, to dismiss it. Indeed, all successful political movements rely on the construction of what historian Benedict Anderson refers to as an ‘imagined community.’ Anderson coined the term in his book of the same name, where it referred to the concept of a ‘nation’: the objective of the book was to explain why ‘since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms.’ But Anderson’s definition applies not only to nationalism, but to any kind of collective political identity of the sort necessary for a successful political movement.” [Peter Frase, “An Imagined Community: regional identities and the Left.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 3–4, summer 2011. Pages 51-52.]

“The new wars always have political and social goals, but these are neither national political objectives, nor traditional imperial objectives any more. This transformation can be explained by the change in the dominant classes, which manage the globalization of the market economy thanks to the digitalization of the financial system and to the technical change in the morphology of the use of violence, also made possible by the electronic revolution. Under this double relationship, the space–time of national objectives of the bourgeoisies of yore has disappeared. It is not a big loss, but it is a big change that, for the time being, destroys the consensual framework of democracy that has long been tied to the scale of the nation-state, which has become inadequate, not to say stupid, in the presence of global strategies. The destruction of ‘national’ or ‘Westphalian’ war objectives has, as its corollary, the proliferation of wars of policing and permanent repression that, without the control and adaptive answers coming from popular forces, could everywhere turn into a form of concentrated and globalized fascist strategy, which would drag the oikoumene [inhabited earth] towards a permanent, Schmittian state of exception. A sort of universal barbarism (the inverse of [Immanuel] Kant’s universal peace) would thus provide legitimacy to all kinds of pillaging and destruction of the environment, capable of increasing the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor to a boiling point.” [Alain Joxe, “The barbarization of peace: The neo-conservative transformation of war and perspectives.” Conflict, Security and the Reshaping of Society: The civilization of war. Alessandro Dal Lago and Salvatore Palidda, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Pages 37-56.]

“The division of the world into two camps, which no longer interests anyone today, had two advantages. The first was to posit the existence of Humanity in eschatological terms. An entire generation of strategists forced itself to think about the end of the world in order to avoid it. The second was the institutionalization, through this binary division, of the somewhat occult separation of the world between rich and poor countries. This aspect should not be forgotten: there was at the time a semi-alliance between Communist countries – semi-poor themselves – and underdeveloped Third World countries. Today, the becoming-Third World of former Communist nations has succeeded the communization of Third World countries, revealing the existence of a comparable level of development in cultural spaces as diverse as Latin America and the Russian Empire. For a historian of the long-term, it is as if these two late semi-colonial Roman Empires, each with its own history of slavery, the Russian and the Spanish Empires, that spread the wings of their two-headed eagle to the East and West respectively, were now brought together in a common fate after a century of differences. With each empire like the Ottoman Sultanate leaving behind balkanized confederations to the South of the overdeveloped Euro-American center.” [Alain Joxe, “The Empire of Disorder.” Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader. Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, editors. Los Angeles, California: Semiotext(e). 2001. Ebook edition.]

“… the collapse of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] has created both significant problems and potential opportunities for the radical left. Most damagingly, the radical left lacks a clear meta-narrative, a financially strong infrastructure, and an alternative developmental model. But on the positive side, the decline of the Communist International has allowed the New Radical Left to free itself from the ideological constraint and taint of the Soviet model and orient itself towards national conditions without the risk of censure (or competition) from Moscow. This new environment could create opportunities for (at least) two new radical left actors, the parliamentary social-populist parties and the extraparliamentary anti-globalization movement.” [Luke March and Cas Mudde, “What’s Left of the Radical Left? The European Radical Left After 1989: Decline and Mutation.” Comparative European Politics. Volume 3, 2005. Pages 23-49.]

“The authoritarianism/democracy cleavage enduringly shaped the ideology and organization of Left parties. In countries where the battles between supporters of authoritarianism and democracy were most salient—competitive and prolonged—as in France and other Southern European countries, Socialist parties from their inception tended to be ‘citizens’ parties with relatively universalist ideologies and explicitly open organiza tions. By contrast, in countries where the authoritarianism/ democracy cleavage was salient but where Socialists did not face great competition in representing the democratic pole, as in Germany, or where the authoritarianism/democracy conflict had been largely resolved by bourgeois parties prior to the formation of a Socialist party, as in Britain, Left parties displayed the materialist ideology, the tightly knit subculture, and the mass organization associated with workers’ parties. As a result, the ‘political’ face of the Left was differentially incor porated into the repertoires of the various Left parties—most prominent in the citizens’ parties, and much less so in the workers’ parties.” [Serenella Sferza, “What Is Left of the Left? More than One Would Think.” Daedalus. Volume 128, number 2, spring 1999. Pages 101-126.]

“Posthumanism, as I will define it here, is not an overcoming of the human but takes a similar form to the structure of nihilism.… The posthuman, similarly, renounces human privilege or species-ism but then fetishizes the posthuman world as man-less; ‘we’ are no longer elevated, separated, enclosed, detached from a man-less world, for there is a direct interface and interconnection—a mesh or network, a living system—that allows for one world of computers, digital media, animals, things and systems. There is a continuation of the humanities, which had always refused that man had any end other than that which he gave to himself, in the posthuman notion that man is nothing but a point of relative stability, connected to one living system that he can feel affectively and read.” [Claire Colebrook. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press imprint of imprint of Michigan Publishing. 2014. Pages 159-160.]

“The analytical framework outlined in this chapter is rooted in an understanding of the practice and activity of care as a relational process between receivers and givers, usually involving exchange. This supports a substantive concern with historical, cultural and national variation between different overall systems of care provision and the rights that attach to them. Approached this way, the many possible groundings and kinds of rights come into sharp focus. Informal, taken-for-granted expectations and personal or traditional obligations are equally to be considered under the heading of rights as formalisec commitments or state-enforceable laws prescribing citizen- or employment-based rights or putative or universal human rights with their international sanctions. I have concentrated on the right to receive care, but other additional rights, which there is not space to discuss, would be directly implicated in this. The right to give care is the most obvious, but the rights of care workers (paid and unpaid) would also be significant, especially with respect to employment and working conditions.” [Miriam Glucksmann, “Developing an economic sociology of care and rights.” Rights: Sociological Perspecives. Lydia Morris, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 55-71.]

“[Miriam] Glucksmann offers an engaging discussion about the potential for sociology to make new ground in the areas of citizenship and human rights. Her attention to the question of how access to rights is to be operationalised is of paramount relevance. Rights, Glucksmann concludes, ‘are linked to the circumstances in which they emerge.’ Thus, it is the task of the sociologists to make sense of those circumstances, and to show that claims for the universality of given rights (care rights, for instance) should be replaced by a thorough analysis of the ‘variability in why, when, how and under what circumstances’ rights are likely or not to emerge as a demand.” [Kerman Calvo, “Rights: Sociological Perspecives.” Review article. Essex Human Rights Review. Volume 4, number 1, February 2007. Pages 1-3.]

“The only philosophical position that can defend the honour of materialism in this situation [the dominance of neopositivism] consists of decisively rejecting the old, metaphysical understanding of ‘ideality,’ and of decisively accepting the dialectical-materialist interpretation, which was developed by Karl Marx. The first step on the path to a critical materialist transformation of the Hegelian dialectic, proceeds from the acceptance of the ‘ideality’ of the phenomena of the external world themselves, the world that is outside of and prior to man with his head, and then, more concretely, in the course of the positive solution to the problem of the ‘value-form’ and its fundamental difference from value in itself – this most-typical case of the opposition between a ‘purely ideal form’ and its own material image.” [Evald Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal.” Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism. Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen, editors. Boston, Massachusetts: Leiden. 2014. Pages 25-78.]

“The ‘nomenclature’ which was accepted in his [Vladimir Lenin’s] era contains a great deal of truth within it. But grandiose illusions are connected with it as well. The collective psyche of mankind (spirit), which has already been developing for thousands of years, is actually primary in relation to every separate ‘psychic molecule’, to every individual consciousness (soul). An individual soul is born and dies (in contrast to Kant, Hegel caustically and ironically ridiculed the idea of the immortality of the soul), but the aggregate – ‘total’ – spirit of mankind lives and has been developing for thousands of years already, giving birth to ever newer and newer separate souls and once again swallowing them up, thereby preserving them in the make-up of spiritual culture, in the make-up of the spirit.” [Evald Ilyenkov. Reflections on Lenin’s book: “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.” Pacifica, California: Marxists Internet Archive (Marxists.org) ebook edition. 1979. Page 18.]

“The concepts and the propositions of the theory of the continuous transformation groups often have their analogues in the theory of substitutions, that is to say, in the theory of the discontinuous groups. In the course of our studies, we will not emphasize this analogy every time, but we will more often remember it by translating the terminology of the theory of substitutions into the theory of transformation groups, and this shall take place as far as possible.

“Here, we want to point out that the one-term groups in the theory of transformation groups play the same rôle as the groups generated by a single substitution in the theory of substitutions.

“In a way, we shall consider the one-term groups, or their infinitesimal transformations, as the elements of the r-term group. In the studies about r-term groups, it is, almost in all circumstances, advantageous to direct at first the attention towards the infinitesimal transformations of the concerned group and to choose them as the object of study.”

[Sophus Lie and Friedrich Engel. Theory of Transformation Groups I: General Properties of Continuous Transformation Groups. A Contemporary Approach and Translation. Joël Merker, editor and translator. New York: Springer Heidelberg imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. 2015. Pages 59-60.]

“Parallel transformation is known to turn rounded lines into rounded lines, and it is reality easy to verify that the corresponding transformation of r is a linear point-transformation.” [Marius Sophus Lie. Over a Class of geometric Transformations. Erik Trell, translator. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Christiania. Christiania (now, Oslo), Norway. 1871. Page 443.]

“From deep ecology and other ‘green’ critiques of Enlightenment and Cartesian instrumentality (including those developed in ecofeminism) I find sustenance for a more nuanced dialectical and process-based argument concerning our positionality in the natural world. Writers as diverse as [Alfred North] Whitehead and [Richard Charles] Cobb, [Arne] Næss, and [Van] Plumwood have something important to say on this and I do not find it impossible to translate at least some of what they say into the language of a relational Marxism. This does not lead me to accept some of the more strident rejections of Enlightenment thought (indeed, I think on balance it was positive and liberatory), but it reinforces a rejection of mechanistic and positivist accounts of our postionality in an relation to the rest of the natural world that have often infected Marxism as well as conventional bourgeois forms of analysis.” [David Harvey, “Marxism, Metaphors, and Ecological Politics.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 49, issue 11, April 1998. Pages 17-30.]

“… it is possible to tell the difference between the three main layers in the concept of the law: complete (perfect), incomplete (imperfect) and unfinished (illusionary or naked) law.…

“… the concept of the law in the expanded sense contains, in layers, three types of the state and three types of the autonomous law. The first layer consists of complete laws – the state law and the autonomous law that have all the common characteristics of the law. The second layer consists of ‘imperfect’ laws …, or the laws with ‘decreased value’ … – the state law and the autonomous law that have the majority of common characteristics, including the state sanction. Finally, the third layer consists of the illusions of the law, unfinished or unrealized laws – ‘the naked’ state law and the autonomous law that, among the majority of its common characteristics, do not have the state sanction. However, neither are such norms meaningless from the point of view of political culture and social life because it could happen that they subsequently receive the state sanction, for example, by passing a legal provision concerning their sanction or, by a decision of a constitutional or some other court, when subsequently they become complete legal norms (leges perfectae). This shows that the concept of the law is not monolithic or one-sided, as might appear, but is complex, shaded and totally made of layers of different degrees of being legal.…

“Such multilayeredness – resembling a series of coverings of an onion bulb – is not random. It exists in all scientific systems, from the structure of the universe to the structure of an atom.”

[Dragan M. Mitrović and Marko S. Trajković, “The Realistic Concept of the Law.” Synthesis Philosophica. Volume 27, number 1, January 2013. Pages 159-180.]

“What I’m labeling as a new transnationalism is resolutely anticolonialist and anti-imperialist, ambivalently antinationalist, firmly if often inchoately anticapitalist, generally anti-authoritarian, and in no way organizationally unified. It recognizes the importance of resistance ‘in the belly of the beast’ while affirming self-determination in an array of communities of resistance and the right of liberation struggles to choose the tactics which they find most suitable to that end. If that sounds like a lot of ‘anti’ and not much ‘pro,’ it often is.

“… this shared approach, with all its internal tensions, is deeply inscribed on current Jewish critiques of Zionism as well as the current Palestine solidarity movement more generally.”

[Daniel Lang/Levitsky, “Jews Confront Zionism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 61, issue 2, June 2009. Pages 47-54.]

“The shape the minimalist movement has taken is constituted through emergent forms of capitalist relations, rather than existing outside of them. Few contemporary minimalists pursue back to the land practices or projects geared toward fostering global resource equality and justice. Instead, many are invested in benefiting from and/or engaging in consumer capitalist relations and are focused on gaining financial independence.…

“… although … individual decisions matter, they are not the sort of collective radical political action necessary to challenge the dominance of capitalist relations.… However, in their current manifestation, minimalist practices do not represent a collective challenge to the dominance of US consumer capitalism, and in many cases, represent little more than a niche market that a relatively small number of defectors have created for themselves to opt out of wage labor.”

[Jason Rodriguez, “The US Minimalist Movement: Radical Political Practice?” Review of Radical Political Economics. OnlineFirst edition. January, 2017. Pages 1-11.]

“For many people the idea of anti-capitalism seems ridiculous. After all, look at the fantastic technological innovations in the goods and services produced by capitalist firms in recent years: smart phones and streaming movies; driverless cars and social media; Jumbotron screens at football games and video games connecting thousands of players around the world; every conceivable consumer product available on the internet for rapid home delivery; astounding increases in the productivity of labor through novel automation technologies; and on and on. And while it is true that income is unequally distributed in capitalist economies, it is also true that the array of consumption goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere. Just compare the United States in the half century between 1965 and 2015: The percentage of Americans with air conditioners, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, and indoor plumbing has increased dramatically in those fifty years. Life expectancy is longer; infant mortality lower. The list goes on and on.” [Erik Olin Wright, “How to be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21ˢᵗ Century.” Journal of Australian Political Economy. Number 77, winter 2016. Pages 5-23.]

“In this article, I suggest that the presumed linkages between epistemology, methodology, and politics were never fundamental or immutable—and that recent years have brought significant realignments. Right-wing political operatives have coopted many of the epistemologies and methods traditionally associated with the postpositivist academic left. A new generation of progressive, critical geographers is doing first-rate work … that is revitalizing the scientific rigor, policy relevance, and political power of the left. I analyze how this movement of strategic positivism is an integral (but single) element of a pluralist geography that mobilizes trust and deference to synthesize individual specialization and collective goals to build emancipatory geographies.…

“… strategic positivism recognizes the dangers of universalizing, decontextualized epistemological truth claims of the sort advocated by hard-core positivists in the mid-twentieth century …. Yet strategic positivism also avoids the oppositional universality of antifoundational thought.”

[Elvin Wyly, “Strategic Positivism.” The Professional Geographer. Volume 61, number 3, August 2009. Pages 310-322.]

“Globalectics is derived from the shape of the globe. On its surface, there is no one center; any point is equally a center. As for the internal center of the globe, all points on the surface are equidistant to it—like the spokes of a bicycle wheel that meet at the hub. Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region. The global is that which humans in spaceships or on the international space station see: the dialectical is the internal dynamics that they do not see. Globalectics embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the era of globalism and globalization.” [Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory imprint of Columbia University Press. 2012. Page 8.]

“His [Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s] works include novels, plays, short stories, children’s literature and essays. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o … was born in Kamirithu near Limuruin Kiambu district and baptised James Ngũgĩ.” [David Odongo, “Telling the African Story.” Ipsos. October 20th, 2013. Page 25.]

“This study adopts interpretive qualitative content analyses of documentary and interview accounts to critically describe the practice of animal management and suggest why it takes place the way it does. An ontological-methodological framework is introduced to frame the practice of animal management, relating the methodology of animal management to the underlying ontological orientation of local government. This study highlights some institutional conditions which allow particular animal management activities to flourish. Enforcement of barking dog nuisance and responsible dog ownership education are shown to demonstrate attributes of regulatory success. Conversely, enforcement of effective control and community education processes demonstrate some attributes of regulatory failure.…

“To explore this animal management framework in practice, institutional discourse from interviewee accounts is examined with a view to understanding why particular regulatory approaches are more or less effective in particular circumstances. The degree and nature of regulation of dogs importantly affects their welfare in the community. In reflecting and reflexively driving community expectations, regulation affects how dogs are perceived by the broader community and how that perception translates into freedoms afforded to dogs.”

[Simon Bruce Carter, “Establishing a framework to understand the regulation and control of dogs in urban environments: a case study of Melbourne, Australia.” SpringerPlus. Volume 5, issue 1, December 2016. Pages 1-13.]

“In the latest instance of financialization, life (whatever that is) wriggles under an emergently totalizing field of informatics—all communication, all knowing, becomes inseparable from image and code. The expanded field of operations under the domain of the logistics of the screen/image, which places perception and discourse in a feedback loop with capitalized machinery and makes these subject to algorithmic governance clearly extends to the cinema—indeed cinema was a kind of first instance where the dynamics of what was to come became discernible.

“The reparsing of the informatics of images (of viewing the image as fundamentally composed of information) is also bringing about a reconceptualization and reprogramming of photographic image-capture at the computational level. As it turns out, a tremendous amount of information is lost in the classical projection of images by conventional optics. Rather than creating a limited projection with a single focal plane, as with the classical optical camera projecting light onto an emulsion plate, light field cameras (such as Lytro), use digital sensors ‘to capture all the light’ (all rays of light traveling in space at every point) and thus to capture its directional information. This apparatus moves image capture into the explicitly computational domain. Images can be refocused after the fact in a kind of reverse rendering such that any given image can be refocused at any plane in the field merely by indicating a focal point on that plane with a finger or a mouse and recalibrating the depth of field.”

[Jonathan Beller, “Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Issue 5.1, spring 2016. Creative Commons. Online publication. No pagination.]

“This forum examines how movements in scholarship around settler colonialism, new materialisms, disability, and institutionality have profoundly unsettled key foundations of scholarly inquiry. We argue that these emergent critical analytics provide pivotal points of entry into the task of radically reconceptualizing the dominant bodies of the human(ities).…

“To formally reflect this project of imagining institutionality otherwise toward alternative humanities, this forum will stage conversations between established scholars and emerging scholars (students and junior faculty). Conventional institutional structures often premise a generational approach that privileges linear models of academic development, which can often be reproduced even within formal and informal practices of mentorship. In contrast, we aim to lateralize this relationship by juxtaposing comments by scholars across various institutional positions and intellectual trajectories side-by-side so that unexpected new relationalities may arise from these collaborations. In what ways might the stakes and uses of these analytics—settler colonialism, new materialisms, disability, and institutionality—in research and teaching shift based on one’s professional position and locale? How might students, recent graduates, contingent faculty, nontenured or junior scholars approach these analytics otherwise?”

[Chris A. Eng and Amy K. King, “Forum Introduction: Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Issue 5.1, spring 2016. Creative Commons. Online publication. No pagination.]

“My point here, if it requires saying, is not to accuse all men of being potential rapists and wife-batterers; this would be to indulge in a cultural mythology about men as pernicious as the sexual temptress myths about women. Rather, my aim is to demonstrate the continuing historical power and pervasiveness of certain cultural images and ideology to which not just men but also women (since we live in this culture, too) are vulnerable. Women and girls frequently internalize this ideology, holding themselves to blame for unwanted advances and sexual assaults. This guilt festers into unease with our femaleness, shame over our bodies, and self loathing. For example, anorexia nervosa, which often manifests itself after an episode of sexual abuse or humiliation, can be seen as at least in part a defense against the ‘femaleness’ of the body and a punishment of its desires. Those desires … have frequently been culturally represented through the metaphor of female appetite. The extremes to which the anorectic takes the denial of appetite (that is, to the point of starvation) suggest the dualistic nature of her construction of reality: either she transcends body totally, becoming pure ‘male’ will, or she capitulates utterly to the degraded female body and its disgusting hungers. She sees no other possibilities, no middle ground.” [Susan Bordo. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1993. Pages 7-8.]

“Arguably, [Susan] Bordo can be termed the ‘godmother’ of Body Studies and this text [Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body] is viewed by many as one of the first in this area of scholarship. Drawing upon a Foucauldian framework, Unbearable Weight has inspired innumerable scholars largely because it was one of the first to demonstrate the importance of critical and cultural theory for the lived experience of the gendered self. Beautifully written and drawing upon relevant cultural examples, Bordo’s text is essential reading for anyone hoping to engage with Body Studies.” [Niall Richardson and Adam Locks. Body Studies: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Page 22.]

“When a friend had her nose fixed at age seventeen, that settled it. She and I never spoke about her surgery, but somehow the mothers got together and conferred. Even though I couldn’t see the difference myself following my friend’s surgery, my mother was more than enthusiastic. I suppose her postsurgical nose was slightly smaller. In those days, the only kinds of noses that made me think of surgery were very large noses. Slightly large (like my friend’s) or wide noses (like mine) or noses with bumps all seemed fine to my adolescent perception of faces.

“Young children and adolescents receive their body images wholly from the outside. The adolescent girl, especially, enters the world tentatively and waits for it to say yes or no to her face and body. Now that my face had emerged from its childish amorphousness, it was finished enough to predict its disadvantages. Negotiating adolescence can feel like traveling in a herd of sorts, always under fire or under threat of some dangerous predator; you hope that you will escape notice. Then one day you are singled out—shot down in the field —just when you imagined yourself safely swallowed in anonymity.”

[Virginia L. Blum. Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2003. Page 2.]

“As part of my ethnography, I have examined a wide assortment of body-based female rituals at the Tomb of Mary. The findings shed light on the interplay between rituals, embodiment, and territoriality, namely the manner in which corporeal rituals tie into land, religious architecture, and cityscape. I show how devotees’ emphasis on corporeal practices and symbols of fertility, rebirth, and maternity at this ancient grotto invigorates the Christian imagination with respect to land ownership and minority identity. These rituals, which I term ‘womb-tomvenerations,’ are manifested in an exceedingly tense, multi-dimensional context: the well-documented Jewish-Muslim struggle in Israel/Palestine; the unrest therein between various Christian denominations; the freighted relations between the Orthodox Patriarchate and both the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority; as well as the internal strife within the local Orthodox church pitting its predominately ethnic Greek clergy against its Arab-Palestinian laity.” [Nurit Stadler, “Land, fertility rites and the veneration of female saints: Exploring body rituals at the Tomb of Mary in Jerusalem.” Anthropological Theory. Volume 15, number 3, 2015. Pages 293-316.]

“Growing academic interest in the human body, in both the humanities and social sciences, is an intellectual response to fundamental changes in the contemporary relationship between bodies, technology and society. Scientific advances in medicine and genetics, in particular the new reproductive technologies, stem-cell research, cryonics and cloning techniques, have given the human body a problematic social and cultural status. The global market for the sale of organs has also raised many legal and moral questions about the ownership and economic value of human bodies. For many bio-gerontologists, ageing, disease and death no longer appear to be necessary, immutable facts about the human condition, but contingent and therefore malleable features of human existence. Quite simply the longevity project of rejuvenative medicine proposes that death is avoidable. Many of these medical techniques – such as cryonics for freezing bodies – are still at an experimental stage, but aspects of these technologies will eventually begin to influence our lives in dramatic ways. Alongside these developments, there is an array of procedures associated with cosmetic surgery that are now simply routine features of the management of personal appearance.” [Bryan S. Turner, “Introduction: The Turn of the Body.” Routledge Handbook of Body Studies. Bryan S. Turner, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 1-17.]

“The body is the material base of our existence as a human being. The body tells our story: Who am I, who are we?

“On one hand, the body is a part of human existence, which the individual is not free just to choose freely. On the other hand, the body is not determined from the very beginning. Between the given body on one hand and intentional body management on the other, body culture develops in a process, which is historical and collective. The study of body culture casts light on this process and its contradictions between ‘just doing’ and ‘trying to steer.’

“People ‘make’ their own body, but they do not make it of their own individual will.”

[Henning Eichberg, “The study of body culture: observing practice.” Anthropologia a Cultura Ciala/Anthropology & Body Culture. Volume 6, 2006. Pages 194-200.]

“In this article, I discuss sport as a field of investigation in feminist cultural studies, with a particular attention to the sportswoman as a transgressing creature. Through a historical perspective on sport as an arena for constructing and legitimizing gender, but correspondingly also for gender ‘troubling,’ I will discuss how studies of sport and physical activities contribute to the theorizing of body, gender and difference. The sportswoman continues to pose a challenge to established gender relations and dichotomies; nature/culture, mind/body, masculine/feminine, man/woman, flesh/representation. From the ‘Soviet amazon’ of the Cold War, to more recent cases of submitting women to gender tests, transgressions in sport have publicly demonstrated and pushed the boundaries of cultural understandings of gender.” [Helena Tolvhed, “Sex Dilemmas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport.” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. Volume 5, 2013. Pages 273-289.]

“Here, I revisit the epistemic roots of the body image while also engaging the rich contemporary literature on embodiment and corporeality from a body studies perspective in order to situate the narratives of amputees about the relationship between dismemberment, prosthetization, phantom limb syndrome, and body image. Stories about living with artificial, fleshy, phantomed, and residual limbs unquestionably reveal a number of peculiarities unique to amputees. However, they also offer a distinctively productive ingress into the analytic utility of a ‘re-visioned’ conceptualization of the body image more broadly speaking.” [Cassandra S. Crawford, “Body Image, Prostheses, Phantom Limbs.” Body & Society. Volume 21, number 2, 2014. Pages 221-244.]

“Arguments within some neuroscientific accounts attempt to account for consciousness with reference to neuronal actively alone …. However, one of the aims of [Gail] Weiss’s account of key figures associated with habit is to demonstrate that these dualities are not so clear-cut, particularly when we consider the histories of the debates that are marshalled by accounts of habit.” [Lisa Blackman, “Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History.” Body & Society. Volume 19, numbers 2 and 3, 2013. Pages 186-216.]

“In the intervening years since [Michel] Foucault’s seminal analyses of disciplinary surveillance and biopower, surveillance studies scholars have attended to the surveillance-embodiment nexus in various ways. But interestingly, … research collaborations that entwine the fields of surveillance and body studies have been limited. As the field was coalescing during the mid to late 1980s, scholars contemplated the relationship between surveillance and discrimination based on embodied traits like race, sex, age, health, genes, and so on.” [Martin French and Gavin J. D. Smith, “Surveillance and Embodiment: Dispositifs of Capture.” Body & Society. Volume 22, number 2, 2016. Pages 3-27.]

“Body & Society has since its inception in 1995 played a prominent role in developing the field of body-studies across the humanities and social sciences. It was edited by Mike Featherstone and Bryan Turner who carried through the innovation and creativity of its companion journal, Theory, Culture & Society, in establishing Body & Society as one of the key innovators in the field. Since that time the journal has moved beyond the ‘sociology of the body’ and appealed to a trans-disciplinary audience, including the disciplines of anthropology, art history, communications, cultural history, cultural studies, environmental studies, feminism, film studies, health studies, leisure studies, medical history, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, science studies, sociology and sport studies. The journal has always been characterized by its theoretical openness, reflected in the diverse and wide range of critical approaches to the body reflected in the journal.” [Lisa Blackman and Mike Featherstone, “Re-visioning Body & Society.” Body & Society. Volume 16, number 1, 2010. Pages 1-5.]

“Studies of embodiment have occupied an increasingly important role in sociology and across the social sciences and humanities since the 1980s. This ‘rise of the body’ has led not only to the establishment of a vibrant interdisciplinary area of ‘body studies’, but has also prompted an ongoing reconstruction of disciplinary and subdisciplinary areas seeking to account more adequately for the embodied nature and consequences of their subject matter. It has also been responsible for a shift in mainstream social theory. A growing number of works concerned with performativity, structuration theory, nature, realism, feminism, and human creativity, for example, are illustrative of an increasingly widespread recognition that the embodied subject needs to be central to any comprehensive understanding of social life.” [Chris Shilling, “The Rise of the Body and the Development of Sociology.” Sociology. Volume 39, number 4, 2005. Pages 761-767.]

“Whereas film studies has drawn upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS [science and technology studies] has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements. At the same time that attention to bodies and embodiment has increased in both film studies and STS, questions of how we might refigure life in ways that conjoin the human and nonhuman have revitalized the field of body studies ….” [Jackie Stacey and Lucy Suchman, “Animation and Automation – The Liveliness and Labours of Bodies and Machines.” Body & Society. Volume 18, number 1, 2012. Pages 1-46.]

“Drawing from sociology, work in body studies and affect theory, and informed by my own ethnographic work on lesbian/queer sadomasochism, in this article I seek to illuminate by way of respondent subjectivities how the body, this ‘drag on signification’ (Martin, 1994), is formative of desire. That is, narratives highlight the centrality of gender (and thus the body) when it comes to desire and the formation of sexuality more generally. To reiterate, the gendered body does not ‘thwart’ desire so much as generate it.” [Corie J. Hammers, “The queer logics of sex/desire and the ‘missing’ discourse of gender.” Sexualities. Volume 18, number 7, 2015. Pages 838-858.]

“This article recognizes the apparent ambiguity of Japan when viewed from Western-based science, and suggests ways in which this necessitates some qualifications to theories in the sociology of sport and the sociology of the body. It is of necessity exploratory, since research has primarily relied upon desk-based, English-language, sources. It is, however, based upon seven years of monitoring and reviewing contemporary and historical data, popular magazine and newspaper articles (some in Japanese as well as in English) and academic writings on sport and body culture in Japan.” [John Horne, “Understanding Sport and Body Culture in Japan.” Body & Society. Volume 6, number 2, 2000. Pages 73-86.]

“… [This article] looks at the keep-fit culture not as a series of commercial images nor as the product of broader cultural values, but as a set of situated body practices, that is, practices taking place within specific institutions where these values are not just reproduced but translated and, to some extent, filtered.” [Roberta Sassatelli, “Interaction Order and Beyond: A Field Analysis of Body Culture within Fitness Gyms.” Body & Society. Volume 5, numbers 2–3, 1999. Pages 227-248.]

“… [The] framing of tattoo as part of a performance of self, while useful as a metaphor, threatens to devolve into the modernist myth of individual sovereignty, or conversely postmodern deconstruction. Tattoo scholarship and body studies more generally have been instrumental in shaping the goals of the project, and while I am in dialog with these, the goal was never strictly academic, any more than it was simply to tell stories. ‘Tattoo culture’ was/is intended to intervene, through creative activity.” [Karen J. Leader, “Stories on the Skin: Tattoo Culture at a South Florida university.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education. Volume 14, number 4, 2015. Pages 426-446.]

“Body-studies are quite a new sphere of humanities. Although the discipline has its origins in the 1980s, the socio-cultural anthropology of the body became an important scientific field in the 1990s.…

“Regardless of the perspective taken, there is one shared characteristic of the issue that links the different approaches towards the somatic: a focus on the body not only opens new scientific perspectives, but also forces scholars to show nuances and even to redefine many issues which seemed clear.”

[Danuta Sosnowska, “Fryderyk Chopin’s correspondence from the perspective of body studies. The discovery of corporeality.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology. Volume 9, 2011. Pages 265-281.]

“The rise of body studies has, since its development in the early 1980s, been characterized by a resilience and creativity that shows no signs of abating. There are various reasons for this success, but two are especially worthy of note. Socially informed studies of the materialities, capacities and connectedness of body subjects have maintained their capacity to advance disciplinary, cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary work on the subject into new agendas. Additionally, emerging studies in the field continue to facilitate a sustained interrogation of those residual categories that have helped to define, but also restrict, the reach and ambition of sociology and related disciplines, and advance our understanding of social actions, social relationships and societies.” [Chris Shilling, “Afterword: Embodiment, Social Order, and the Classification of Humans as Waste.” Societies. Volume 3, 2013. Open access. Pages 261-265.]

“The Deleuzian-Spinozan concept of affect is particularly important in the analysis of bodies and body work practices. ‘Affect’ is a burgeoning area in the field of body-studies in sociology, and is implicated in the theoretical reformulation of bodies as processes rather than entities. Affect can be understood as ‘embodied sensations’; as simply the capacity to affect and be affected. Affects mediate action, or becomings …. For this reason affect can be likened to agency, but avoids the problematic aspects inherent in the term, such as its oppositional usage and does not presume the human body as prior to subjectivity ….” [Julia Coffey, “Bodies, health and gender: exploring body work practices using Deleuze.” Research Report 34. Youth Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne. October, 2012. Pages 1-19.]

“According to [Michel] Foucault, the medical profession historically gained considerable power to define reality through the control of privileged and respected scientific knowledge. Medical knowledge came to define the boundaries of normality and deviance. Medicine has also objectified our bodies, bringing them under the surveillance of the medical system as objects to be manipulated and controlled. Thus, at the level of ideology, medicine creates the discourse that defines which bodies, activities, and behaviors are normal; at the level of practice, medical procedures are a principal source of the institutional regulation and disciplining of bodies.” [Jen Pylypa, “Power and Bodily Practice: Applying the Work of Foucault to an Anthropology of the Body.” Arizona Anthropologist. Number 13, 1998. Pages 21-36.]

“… it seems possible to propose a synthesis that merges the social constructionist (SC) and universalist approaches into a unified view of emotions and emotion language. It seems appropriate to call this unified approach ‘body-based constructionism’ (BBC) and the prototypical cultural models that the approach aims to uncover the ‘embodied cultural prototype.’ I can of course only suggest this as a hypothesis; much further research will be required to prove it. Many additional languages will have to be analyzed by the methodology described in this book, focusing on emotions other than just the few emotion concepts we have looked at here. It will be important that the languages examined in this light include the ones that provided the evidence for the social-constructionist thesis in the first place.

“Essentially, the synthesis involves acknowledging that some aspects of emotion language and emotion concepts are universal and clearly related to the physiological functioning of the body. Once the universal aspects of emotion language are parsed out, the very significant remaining differences in emotion language and concepts can be explained by reference to differences in cultural knowledge and pragmatic discourse functions that work according to divergent culturally defined rules or scenarios ….”

[Zoltán Kövecses. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Page 183.]

“Embodiment is one of the key ideas of cognitive linguistics that clearly distinguishes the cognitive linguistic conception of meaning from that of other cognitively-oriented theories. In the emergence of meaning, that is, in the process of something becoming meaningful, the human body plays an important role …. It is especially what are known as ‘image schemas’ that are crucial in this regard. Image schemas are based on our most basic physical experiences and are inevitable in making sense of the world around us.…

“Metaphorical conceptualization in natural situations occurs under two simultaneous pressures: the pressure of embodiment and the pressure of context. Context is determined by local culture. This dual pressure essentially amounts to our effort to be coherent both with the body and culture – coherent both with universal embodiment and the culture-specificity of local culture in the course of metaphorical conceptualization. We can achieve this in some cases, but in others it is either embodiment or cultural specificity that plays the more important role.”

[Zoltán Kövecses, “Metaphor and Culture.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica. Volume 2, number 2, 2010. Pages 197-220.]

“[Zoltán] Kövecses proposes a new synthesis between the social constructionist and cognitive linguistic views of emotion concepts, which he names Body-based Constructionism (BBC): ‘We should not forever be imprisoned in the mutually exclusive camps of “universalists” versus “social constructionists” in regard to our views about the conceptualization of emotion.’ He explains that this synthesis will involve acknowledging that some aspects of emotion language and concepts are related to the body and thus are universal, but the differences in emotion language and concepts that are not identified as universal can be explained by examining differences in ‘cultural knowledge and pragmatic discourse functions that work according to divergent culturally defined rules or scenarios.’ He also explains that this viewpoint will allow for examples in which culture may suppress, distort or contradict innate tendencies of emotion.” [Rosemarie I. Sokol and Sarah L. Strout, “A Complete Theory of Human Emotion: The Synthesis of Language, Body, Culture and Evolution in Human Feeling.” Culture & Psychology. Volume 12, number 1, 2006. Pages 115-123.]

“The standard which is emerging in our phase of the civilizing process is characrerized by a profound distance bertween rhe behaviour of so-called ‘adults’ and children. The children have in the space of a few years to attain rhe advanced level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many centuries. Their drives musr be rapidly subjected to the strict conrrol and specific moulding that gives our socitries their stamp, and which developed very slowly over centuries. In this the parents are only the (often inadequate) instruments, the primary agents of the conditioning: through them and thousands of other instruments it is always society as a whole, the entire figuration of human beings. that exerts irs pressure on the new generation, forming them more or less perfectly.” [Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition. Edmund Jephcott, translator. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 2013. Page 119.]

“The configuration of a person’s psychical self-regulation – for example, his or her mother tongue – is, through that person’s having grown up in a particular society, thoroughly ‘typical,’ and is at the same time, through his or her having grown up as a unique reference-point within the network of a society, thoroughly individual, i.e. it is a unique manifestation of this typical product. Individual animals are also different from each other ‘by nature,’ as, certainly, are individual people. But this inherited biological difference is not the same as the difference in the structure of psychical self-regulation in adults that we express by the term ‘individuality.’ To repeat the point, a person who grows up outside human society does not attain such ‘individuality’ any more than an animal. Only through a long and difficult shaping of his or her malleable psychical functions in intercourse with other people does a person’s behaviour-control attain the unique configuration characteristic of a specific human individuality. It is only through a social moulding process within the framework of particular social characteristics that a person evolves the characteristics and modes of behaviour that distinguish him or her from all the other members of his or her society. Society not only produces the similar and typical, but also the individual. The varying degree of individuation among the members of different groups and strata shows this clearly enough.” [Norbert Elias. The Society of Individuals. Edmund Jephcott, translator. Michael Schröter, editor. London and New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. 2001. Pages 59-60.]

“Norbert Elias was born in Breslau [Wroclaw, Poland] in 1897, the son of German Jewish parents. After serving in the German army during World War I, he followed a course in medicine at the University of Breslau. Though his father, a physician, was anxious that Norbert pursue a medical career, Elias soon became enamored of philosophy and psychology. Of his teachers, Richard Honigswald, a leading Neo-Kantian, left the strongest impression – apparently, according to Elias’s later recollection, because of his ‘uncompromising and impatient rejection of metaphysics, old and new alike.’ After spending two semesters at Freiburg and Heidelberg attending lectures by Heinrich Rickert, Karl Jaspers, and Edmund Husserl, Elias returned to Breslau where, in 1922, he took his first and only medical degree.” [Rod Aya, “Norbert Elias and ‘The Civilizing Process.’” Theory and Society. Volume 5, number 2, March 1978. Pages 219-228.]

“The difference between system integration and social integration, which [Jürgen] Habermas took from [David] Lockwood, is defined to hinge on the role and status of meaning: circumscribed by systemic needs and mechanisms in one case, connected to the interpretive operations and initiatives of interacting subjects in the other. The two forms of integration thus involve different relationships between culture and society. In [Norbert] Elias’s version of figurational sociology, there is – because of the marginal status of culture – no place for such distinctions. As a result, the broader frame of reference that constitutes a potential advantage vis-à-vis the theory of communicative action [Habermas] remains underdeveloped; it lacks the conceptual articulations that would allow it to incorporate and generalize Habermas’s critical perspective.” [Johann Arnason, “Figurational Sociology as a Counter-Paradigm.” Theory and Society. Volume 4, number 2, June 1987. Pages 429-456.]

“His [Norbert Elias’] magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, which had appeared in German in Switzerland in 1939, was only translated much later with a confusing delay between the first and second volumes (1977, 1982). Nevertheless, his nearly three post-retirement decades were very productive and contributed to considerable international recognition as the proponent of a process-oriented figurational sociology, especially in Britain, Holland, France and his native Germany.” [Raymond A. Morrow, “Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology: The Comeback of the Century.” Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. Volume 38, number 3, 2009. Pages 215-219.]

“Applications of ‘Embodied’ Figurational Theory

“The under-appreciation of [Norbert] Elias as a complex, multi-disciplinary theorist of embodiment is perhaps no better illustrated than through a brief review of the mainstay subjects to which generational theory is applied.…

“Figurational theory has been launched into even newer embodied terrain of late.…

“The embodied performance of violence (not necessarily decoded as emblematic of civilising or decivilising processes) continues as a staple in generational research. Studies of violence as it is enacted against the body in the suicide process …, against others in the context of mixed martial arts …, or in the act of filicide … attest to the enduring significance of Elias’s work for deconstructing how violence, anger and aggression have interlaced biological, psychological and sociocultural dimensions.”

[Mike Atkinson, “Norbert Elias and the Body.” Routledge Handbook of Body Studies. Bryan S. Turner, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 49-61.]

“Work in body studies has attuned us to the dynamism of bodies—that of morphing, lived materiality. Bodies are not, in other words, inert, self-contained entities …. Corporeal feminists and phenomenologists have exposed this fabrication, that of the singular subject, through illuminating the embodied mind and its relational aspects. These mind–body interlinkages undermine the proprietary view of the body—the bedrock of western logic, denaturalizing in turn the (western) subject …. Corporeal feminists challenge the mind/body dualism and have exposed its foundation in masculinism, where ‘man’ is equated with mind and ‘woman’ with immanence. In seeking to corporealize us all, this vein of feminism severs in the process the male–mind–reason triune. Eschewing the corporeal is impossible since, as phenomenology posits, the body is fundamental/foundational to what we know and who we are.” [Corie Hammers, “Corporeality, Sadomasochism and Sexual Trauma.” Body & Society. Volume 20, number 2, 2014. Pages 68-90.]

“What has been called the ‘corporeal turn’ in recent Jewish studies is provoking anxiety.… But those who took the corporeal turn never left the text behind. Rather, they brought a concern with the body to the text and found new ways to read and think about those texts.…

“… What is new in ‘the new Jewish cultural studies’ is not only the concern with gender and sexuality (corporeality is not to be limited to these important topics in any case) but also the cultural turn in literary studies and the emergence of cultural studies. Text has not gone away. Rather, the corporeal turn has intensified interest in text and offered new ways to think about text as a social, corporeal, and material practice.”

[Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Corporeal Turn.” The Jewish Quarterly Review. Volume 95, number 3, summer 2005. Pages 447-461.]

“As early as 1933, Paek Namun, a Marxist economic historian, gave an insightful comment on the ascendant ethnic discourses. Although these opposed colonial discourses, they were indeed located in the same orbit. He called this relationship ‘homoplasy’ (sangsa), meaning similar qualities with different origins. However, aside from his characterization, An himself had a better grasp. In the early 1930s, he diagnosed that the ‘statism’ of imperial powers and ‘nationalism’ in the colonies were homological, having ‘common roots with different qualities’ (tong’gŭ n ichil). Unlike Paek’s critical stance, An, as a ‘nationalist,’ used the terms to justify and inculcate the ethnic and national consciousness of the Korean people. However, beyond his intention, the term homology conveys more: it also indicates a relationship of antagonistic complicity between colonial and anticolonial discourses.” [Ou-Byung Chae, “Homology Unleashed: Colonial, Anticolonial, and Postcolonial State Culture in South Korea, 1930 – 1950.” Positions. Volume 23, number 2, 2015. Pages 317-347.]

“At the 2006 inter-Korean military talks, the North Korean representative Kim Youngchul criticized a South Korean practice that many South Korean rural men are getting married to foreign brides. He expressed concerns that the ethnic homogeneity of the Korean nation would be seriously damaged as such practices continue. When the South Korean representative replied that it is ‘only like a droplet of ink in the Han river’ and will not be a problem ‘as long as the immigrants can be assimilated into the mainstream of the society’, the counterpart from the North disagreed, saying that ‘not even a droplet of ink should be permitted.’” [Won Joon Jang, “Multicultural Korea: South Korea’s Changing National Identity and the Future of Inter-Korea Relations.” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs. Volume 10, number 2, summer 2015. Pages 94-104.]

“Over the past two decades, the relationship between culture and memory has emerged in many parts of the world as a key issue of interdisciplinary research, involving fields as diverse as history, sociology, art, literary and media studies, philosophy, theology, psychology, and the neurosciences, and thus bringing together the humanities, social studies, and the natural sciences in a unique way. The importance of the notion of cultural memory is not only documented by the rapid growth, since the late 1980s, of publications on specific national, social, religious, or family memories, but also by a more recent trend, namely attempts to provide overviews of the state of the art in this emerging field and to synthesize different research traditions.” [Astrid Erll,  Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, editors. Berlin, Germany, and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2008. Pages 1-15.]

“The cultural memory is based on fixed points in the past. Even in the cultural memory, the past is not preserved as such but is cast in symbols as they are represented in oral myths or in writings, performed in feasts, and as they are continually illuminating a changing present. In the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes. Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered.” [Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, editors. Berlin, Germany, and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2008. Pages 109-118.]

“If all individual memory is socially framed by groups, however, groups themselves also share publicly articulated images of collective pasts. For this reason, Halbwachs distinguished between ‘autobiographical memory’ and ‘historical memory.’ The former concerns the events of one’s own life that one remembers because they were experienced directly. The latter refers to residues of events by virtue of which groups claim a continuous identity through time.” [Jeffrey K. Olick, “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, editors. Berlin, Germany, and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2008. Pages 151-161.]

“By transcending symbolic reality, the drug user may also be said to transcend the sphere of desire. As we have seen, desire emerges as a result of symbolic castration whereby the subject is integrated into the symbolic order, structuring his desire and pointing him in the direction of different sublime objects endowed with certain symbolic meaning. The drug user, however, desires no object for its sensible or symbolic qualities. What the drug user looks for in the drug is an effect beyond the causality of symbolic reality. The drug user seems to be no longer a castrated subject of desire but rather a de-subjectivized body of drive.” [Ole Bjerg, “Drug Addiction and Capitalism: Too Close to the Body.” Body & Society. Volume 14, number 2, June 2008. Pages 1-22.]

“… the waning of the utopian idea is a fundamental historical and political symptom, which deserves diagnosis in its own right—if not some new and more effective therapy. For one thing, that weakening of the sense of history and of the imagination of historical difference which characterizes postmodernity is, paradoxically, intertwined with the loss of that place beyond all history (or after its end) which we call utopia. For another, it is difficult enough to imagine any radical political programme today without the conception of systemic otherness, of an alternate society, which only the idea of utopia seems to keep alive, however feebly.” [Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia.” New Left Review. Series II, number 25, January–February 2004. Pages 35-54.]

“I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is ‘postmodern’ in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses – what Raymond Williams has usefully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural production – must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.” [Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 1991. Page 5.]

“Today’s ‘exceptions’—the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanently unemployed—are the symptom of the late capitalist universal system, a growing and permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that, through appropriate measures (for progressive liberals, affirmative action; for conservatives, a return to self-reliance and family values), this ‘exception’ could be—in the long term and in principle, at least—abolished. And is not a homologous utopia at work in the notion of a ‘rainbow coalition’: in the idea that, at some utopian future moment, all ‘progressive’ struggles—for gay and lesbian rights, for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the ecological struggle, the feminist struggle, and so on—will be united in the common ‘chain of equivalences’? Again, this necessity of failure is structural: the point is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular ‘progressive’ fights will never be united, that ‘wrong’ chains of equivalences will always occur—say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and homophobic ideology—but rather that emergencies of ‘wrong’ enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today’s ‘progressive’ politics of establishing ‘chains of equivalences’: the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations is sustained by the ‘repression’ of the key role of economic struggle—the leftist politics of the ‘chains of equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the silent abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system and to the acceptance of capitalist economic relations as the unquestionable framework.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 225, September–October 1997. Pages 28-51.]

“… the most difficult and important task is a radical economic change that should abolish social conditions that create refugees. The ultimate cause of refugees is today’s global capitalism itself and its geopolitical games, and if we do not transform it radically, immigrants from Greece and other European countries will soon join African refugees. When I was young, such an organized attempt to regulate commons was called Communism. Maybe we should reinvent it. Maybe, this is, in the long term, our only solution.

“Is all this a utopia? Maybe, but if we don’t do it, then we are really lost, and we deserve to be.”

[Slavoj Žižek, “We Can’t Address the EU Refugee Crisis Without Confronting Global Capitalism.” In These Times. Online magazine. September 9th, 2015. No pagination. Retrieved on October 1st, 2015.]

“Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me—it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my ‘material existence.’ Materialism means that the reality I see is never ‘whole’—not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.” [Slavoj Žižek. The Parallax View. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2006. Page 17.]

“‘Marxism’ after [Karl] Marx—in both its Social Democratic and Communist versions—lost this parallax perspective and regressed to a unilateral elevation of production as the site of truth, as against the ‘illusory’ spheres of exchange and consumption.” [Slavoj Žižek, “The Parallax View.” New Left Review. Series II, number 25, January–February 2004. Pages 121-134.]

“The material force of the ideological notion of ‘free choice’ within capitalist democracy was well illustrated by the fate of the [Bill] Clinton Administration’s ultra-modest health reform programme. The medical lobby (twice as strong as the infamous defence lobby) succeeded in imposing on the public the idea that universal healthcare would somehow threaten freedom of choice in that domain. Against this conviction, all enumeration of ‘hard facts’ proved ineffective. We are here at the very nerve-centre of liberal ideology: freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the ‘psychological’ subject, endowed with propensities which he or she strives to realize.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Against Human Rights.” New Left Review. Series II, number 34, July–August 2005. Pages 115-131.]

“Is the fact that Communists in power today are the most dynamic capitalists not the ultimate sign of the triumph of capitalism? Another sign of this triumph is the very fact that the ruling ideology can afford what appears to be ruthless self-critique. There is no lack of anticapitalism today. We are even witnessing an overload of the critique of capitalisms horrors: Books, in-depth newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound with stories about companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers continuing to get fat bonuses while their banks must be saved by public money, and sweatshops working children overtime, etc. There is, however, a catch to all this overflow of critique: What is as a rule not questioned in this critique, ruthless as it may appear, is the democratic-liberal frame of fighting against these excesses.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Living in the Time of Monsters.” Counterpoints. Volume 422, 2012. Pages 32-44.]

“It is not enough to remain faithful to the communist hypothesis: one has to locate antagonisms within historical reality which make it a practical urgency. The only true question today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? Four possible antagonisms present themselves: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new technoscientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums.” [Slavoj Žižek, “How to Begin from the Beginning.” New Left Review. Series II, number 57, May–June 2009. Pages 43-55.]

“… those who preach the need for a return from financial speculation to the ‘real economy’ of producing goods to satisfy real people’s needs, miss the very point of capitalism: self-propelling and self-augmenting financial circulation is its only dimension of the Real, in contrast to the reality of production.” [Slavoj Žižek. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2009. Page 14.]

“A perfect example of … [the] Hegelian inversion – passage of subject into predicate – is offered by the theory of relativity. As is well known, [Albert] Einstein’s revolution in the conception of the relationship between space and matter occurred in two steps. First, he refuted the Newtonian idea of a homogeneous, ‘uniform’ space by demonstrating that matter ‘curves’ space. It is because of matter that the shortest way between two points in space is not necessarily a straight line – if the space is ‘bent’ by matter, the shortest way is a curve.” [Slavoj Žižek. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Page 58.]

“What if, productive as capitalism is, the price we have to pay for its continuous functioning simply has become too high? If we avoid this question and continue to humanize capitalism, we will only contribute to the process we are trying to reverse. Signs of this process abound everywhere, including in the rise of Wal-Mart as the representation of a new form of consumerism targeting the lower classes ….” [Slavoj Žižek. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2012. Page 16.]

“Judaism, with its ‘stubborn attachment’ (Judith Butler’s term …) to the unacknowledged violent Fonnding gesture that hannts the public legal order as its spectral supplement, is not only split within itself between its ‘public’ aspect of the symbolic Law and its obscene underside (the ‘virtual’ narrative of the irredeemable excess of violence that established the very rule of Law) – this split is at the same time the split between Judaism and Christianity.” [Slavoj Žižek. The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2000. Page 97.]

“… there never was a purely symbolic Power without an obscene supplement: the structure of a power edifice is always minimally inconsistent, so that it needs a minimum of sexualization, of the stain of obscenity, to reproduce itself.” [Slavoj Žižek. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1997. Page 90.]

“To break the yoke of habit means: if all men are equal. than all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such. Let us recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the anned conllict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown ….” [Slavoj Žižek. In Defense of Lost Causes. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Page 172.]

“Slavoj Žižek, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at a number of American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). Slavoj Žižek recieved his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Žižek is a cultural critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his innovative interpretations of Jacques Lacan. Slavoj Žižek has been called the ‘Elvis Presley’ of philosophy as well as an ‘academic rock star.’” [“Slavoj Žižek – Biography.” The European Graduate School: Graduate & Postgraduate Studies. 2012. Retrieved on September 28th, 2015.]

“The very core of the ‘passion for the Real’ is this identification with – this heroic gesture of fully assuming – the dirty obscene underside of Power: the heroic attitude of ‘Somebody has to do the dirty work, so let’s do it!,’ a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to recognize itself in its result. We find this stance also in the properly Rightist admiration for the celebration of heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty work: it is easy to do a noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it – it is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country ….” [Slavoj Žižek. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2002. Page 30.]

“… [One] false struggle concerns the status of anti-Semitism and Zionism today. For some pro-Muslim Leftists, Zionism is the exemplary case of today’s neocolonial racism, which is why the Palestinian struggle against Israel is the paradigm for all other anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. In a strictly inverted way, for some Zionists, anti-Semitism (which, for them, lurks in every critique of Zionism) is the exemplary case of today’s racism, so that, in both cases, Zionism (or anti-Semitism) is the particular form of racism which colors all others, which determines the specific weight of the entire field of racism today – the true test of anti-racism today is to fight anti-Semitism (or Zionism), i.e., without fully endorsing this particular struggle, one is accused of secretly playing the racist game (and, in a step further in the same direction, any critical remark about Islam is equated with ‘Islamophobia’). While enough was written about the deeply problematic nature of equating any critique of the Zionist politics of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, one should also render problematic the elevation of Zionism into neo-imperialist racism par excellence.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Answers to Today’s Crisis: A Leninist View.” Crisis & Critique. Volume 1, number 3, 2014. Pages 13-39.]

“This question [the relation between violence and politics] is particularly confused on the Left. Let’s take the use made of two authors, Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, for example. I don’t have any problem with Schmitt. But Schmitt’s concepts of ‘decision’ and ‘exception’ function precisely to erase the crucial distinction governing Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’ namely the distinction between ‘mythical’ and ‘divine’ violence. For Schmitt, to put it quite simply, there is no divine violence. For him there is an illegal violence that is a foundation, a violence of the exception that gives rise to the law. Many Leftists who flirt with Benjamin want to speak of some ‘spectral’ violence that never really happens, or they adopt an attitude like [Giorgio] Agamben’s and simply wait for some magical intervention. I’m sorry, but Benjamin is pretty precise. An example he gives of divine violence is a mob lynching a corrupt ruler! That’s pretty concrete. In a new book I’m writing on violence, I’m going to address this issue. Franz Fanon has suffered a similar fate. He was very clear about the role of violence, and he certainly wasn’t speaking of some ‘transcendental’ violence. He meant killing, he meant terror. But this dimension of their work is not present in contemporary commentators. We have a softened, ‘decaffeinated’ Fanon and Benjamin.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Divine Violence and Liberated Territories: SOFT TARGETS talks with Slavoj Žižek.” Soft Targets. Volume 2, number 1, March 2007. Online Publication. No pagination.]

“The International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) is an online, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to investigating, elaborating, and critiquing the work of Slavoj Žižek. IJŽS is an interdisciplinary journal that is open and welcoming to diverse approaches, methodologies, interpretations, and language of composition.” [“Editorial Policies.” International Journal of Žižek Studies. 2007. Retrieved on September 28th, 2015.]

“Antonio Garcia [conference chair] is an independent researcher and writer. He has taught courses on aesthetics, cultural studies, popular culture, and continental philosophy. His main research interests are in curriculum theory, critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and philosophy. He completed his dissertation, The Eclipse of Education in the End Times: Exploring Žižekian Notions of Fantasy in Education, Democracy, and Multiculturalism, from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He is currently editing a grand volume titled “Žižek and Education” with Sense publishing.” [“Central Steering Committee.” Žižek Studies Conference. Undated. Retrieved on September 28th, 2015.]

“Arguably the most prolific and widely read philosopher of our time, Slavoj Žižek has made significant interventions in many disciplines of the human and natural sciences. Appropriating Lacanian psychoanalysis as a privileged conceptual fulcrum to reload German idealism (Hegel) through Marxism and, more recently, Christianity, Žižek has written extensively (and in several languages) on a dizzying array of topics that include global capitalism, psychoanalysis, opera, totalitarianism, cognitive science, racism, human rights, religion, new media, popular culture, cinema, love, ethics, environmentalism, New Age philosophy, and politics.” [Jamil Khadir, “Introduction – Žižek Now or Never: Ideological Critique and the Nothingness of Being.” Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies. Jamil Khadir and Molly Anne Rothenberg, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“[Slavoj] Žižek tries to define a form of subjectivity by which truly revolutionary violence could confront the inauthentic, excessive and illegitimate violence of the state. (This would go beyond the limited steps of Jack in Fight Club.) In this endeavour, he rehearses the quest of both [Georges] Sorel and, under his immediate influence, Walter Benjamin, both of whom tried to imagine a form of revolutionary violence that would break the spell that compels each creation of a new order to establish a new form of forceful domination.” [Christopher J. Finlay, “Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity: Marx to Žižek.” European Journal of Political Theory. Volume 5, number 4, October 2006. Pages 373-397.]

“[Slavoj] Žižek’s recent polemics against post-Marxism, multiculturalism and identity politics have only served to highlight the distance that now exists between him and his previous collaborators in the UK and USA, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.” [Sean Homer, “It’s the political economy, stupid!: Žižek’s Marxism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 108, July/August 2001. Pages 7-16.]

“At first glance, the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek seems to offer an irresistible range of attractions for theorists wishing to engage with contemporary culture, without accepting the flimsy postmodernist doxa which is often the only available gloss on it. Žižek’s thought is still strongly coloured by his Althusserian background, and he is therefore rightly sceptical of the anti-Enlightenment sloganizing, and revivals of the ‘end of ideology,’ which are the staple of so much cultural commentary today. At the same time, far from being dourly Marxist, his writings are informed by a vivid and sophisticated grasp of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and are enlivened by constant reference to works of fiction, cinema, classical music and opera.” [Peter Dews, “The tremor of reflection: Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 72, July/August 1995. Pages 17-29.]

“This critical exploration of Žižek’s Marxism and dialectical materialism will offer an original contribution to what has been called “the Žižekian Field.” This messy, unevenly developed, and diverse grouping of work mirrors the breadth and width of Žižek’s own interests. As well as countless introductions, and a multi-lingual journal — The International Journal of Žižek Studies — a survey of this terrain finds applications and dissections of Žižek’s work in media studies, political and critical theory, theology, and philosophy. Žižek’s work has also been important in reviving the importance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in political and cultural analysis and for political theory.” [Robert Adam Crich. Slavoj Žižek’s Dialectical Materialist Marxism. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Cardiff University. Cardiff, Wales. 2015. Page 5.]

“Psychoanalysis was initially attached to Marxism as part of the cultural turn which sought to explain the perceived shortcomings of Marxism in response to the continued presence and development of capitalism. In this initial relationship, characterised by the Freudian Marxism of Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School theorists, psychoanalysis was used to add a theory of subjectivity to Marxism in the face of the failure of the Marxist ‘revolutionary subject.’ These theories of subjectivity focused mainly on the role of culture in mediating the effects of capitalism and preventing a true class consciousness from emerging.

“If this could be described as the first phase of ‘Psycho-Marxism’ the second phase was dominated by Louis Althusser’s structuralist revision of Marxism ….

“As such, the psychoanalytic reading of Marxism suggests the possibility of restoring Marxism as a political force in order to provide a response to the global sustainability problematic. Conversely, whilst this ‘psycho-Marxism’ may be able to better explain why the contradictions of global capitalism prove to be obdurate, … we shall see that no form of politics – certainly in terms of the material reproduction of shared social life – stems naturally from the combination of Lacan and Marx. If historical materialism produced not only a reading of capitalism but the inevitable progression of the revolutionary subject, Žižek’s dialectical materialism provides little such confidence.”

[Chris McMillan. Universality and communist strategy: Žižek and the disavowed foundations of global capitalism. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Massey University. Albany, New Zealand. 2010. Pages 61 and 64.]

“In Buddhist terms, the Lacanian act is the exact structural obverse of Enlightenment, of attaining nirvana: the very gesture by means of which the Void is disturbed, and Difference (and, with it, false appearance and suffering) emerges in the world. The act is thus close to the gesture of Bodhisattva who, having reached nirvana, out of compassion—that is, for the sake of the common Good—goes back to phenomenal reality in order to help all other living beings to achieve nirvana.The distance from psychoanalysis resides in the fact that, from the latter’s standpoint, Bodhisattva’s sacrificial gesture is false: in order to arrive at the act proper, one should erase any reference to the Good, and do the act just for the sake of it. (This reference to Bodhisattva also enables us to answer the ‘big question’: if, now,we have to strive to break out of the vicious cycle of craving into the blissful peace of nirvana, how did nirvana ‘regress’ into getting caught in the wheel of craving in the first place? The only consistent answer is: Bodhisattva repeats this primordial ‘evil’ gesture. The fall into Evil was accomplished by the ‘original Bodhisattva’—in short, the ultimate source of Evil is compassion itself.)

“Bodhisattva’s compassion is strictly correlative to the notion that the ‘pleasure principle’ regulates our activity when we are caught in the wheel of Illusion—that is to say, that we all strive toward the Good, and the ultimate problem is epistemological (we misperceive the true nature of the Good)—to quote the Dalai Lama himself, the beginning of wisdom is ‘to realize that all living beings are equal in not wanting unhappiness and suffering and equal in the right to rid themselves of suffering.’ The Freudian drive, however, designates precisely the paradox of ‘wanting unhappiness,’ of finding excessive pleasure in suffering itself— … expresses this fundamental self-blockade of human behavior perfectly.The Buddhist ethical horizon is therefore still that of the Good—that is to say, Buddhism is a kind of negative of the ethics of the Good: aware that every positive Good is a lure, it fully assumes the Void as the only true Good. What it cannot do is to pass ‘beyond nothing,’ into what Hegel called ‘tarrying with the negative’: to return to a phenomenal reality which is ‘beyond nothing,’ to a Something which gives body to the Nothing. The Buddhist endeavor to get rid of the illusion (of craving, of phenomenal reality) is, in effect, the endeavor to get rid of the Real of/in this illusion, the kernel of the Real that accounts for our ‘stubborn attachment’ to the illusion.”

[Slavoj Žižek. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2003. Pages 22-23.]

“… when we are bombarded by claims that in our postideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish which enables you to (pretend to) accept reality ‘the way it is’? ‘Western Buddhism’ is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is – what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw ….

“… What we are unable even to conjecture today is the idea of revolution, be it sexual or social. Perhaps, in today’s stale times of the proliferating pleas for tolerance, one should take the risk of recalling the liberating dimension of such excesses.”

[Slavoj Žižek, “The Prospects of Radical Politics Today.” Documenta11_platform1: Democracy Unrealized. Okwui Enwezor, editor. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2002. Pages 67-85.]

“Love—you find this in Christianity—is onesided, unilateral. Love means ‘I love you more than everything’: love is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil. Love is a kind of radical imbalance.” [Slavoj Žižek in Joshua Delpech-Ramey, “An Interview with Slavoj Žižek ‘On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love.’” Journal of Philosophy & Scripture. Volume 1, issue 2, spring 2004. Pages 32-38.]

“[Slavoj] Žižek’s main charge against western Buddhism is that it functions as the perfect ideology for late capitalism. He points out that it is ironic that today, just when ‘European” technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide’ ….

“It is clear that Žižek misunderstands the Buddhist notion of emptiness as absorption in the One-All. Furthermore, it could be argued that an act of division not unlike the division in the One-All in Žižek’s Christian theology is to be found in the Buddhist enlightenment experience.…

“Žižek’s account of good Christian violence is equally questionable. Žižek argues that unlike bad Buddhist violence, which justifies fascist/capitalist state violence, good Christian violence emerges from the split in the One-All (God is split in God/Christ) and takes the form of revolutionary love. Žižek believes that this Christian violent love breaks with the pagan view of violence, but precisely the opposite is the truth: Žižek falls back into the identification of violence and the sacred that is characteristic of pagan or natural (non-Christian) religion. In fact, Žižek’s linkage of violence and love is best understood on the basis of … the link between violence and the sacred in pagan, natural religion.”

[Eske Møllgaard, “Slavoj “Žižek’s Critique of Western Buddhism.” Contemporary Buddhism. Volume 9, number 2, November 2008. Pages 167-180.]

“This essay started out as a response to Slavoj Žižek’s recent talk at the University of Vermont on ‘Buddhism Naturalized,’ but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity ….

“Ultimately … Žižek’s critique sounds to me not so much as a critique of Buddhism’s philosophical core, which I think he hasn’t adequately grasped, than a critique of one of the main tropes and vehicles by which that philosophical core has so often been adumbrated. This is the trope of inner peace and happiness — the cessation of suffering and attainment of bliss through the elimination of ignorance.…

“… perhaps … why Žižek needs his Marxism: it provides him with an ethical foundation for action. To the extent that it offers an understanding of our relations with all beings who suffer, Buddhism may be more inclusive in this respect: it provides a wider vision for justice and solidarity than Marxism, even at its humanistic best, has ever provided.”

[Adrian J. Ivakhiv, “Žižek V. Buddhism: Who’s the Subject.” Non + X. Issue 9, 2014. Pages 30-38.]

“[Slavoj] Žižek does not mention: Buddhism came from or developed around Bodhigaya, around Benares, India. This was no backwoods-of-Nepal, primitive-ideology that was being espoused by the ‘Fully Enlightened One’. Serious sociological studies assert what Žižek cannot state: ‘The arguments relating the rise of Buddhism to urbanization and state formation can be classified under four headings, according as they bear upon the relevance of Buddhism: (1) to the value of merchants, (2) to the nature of city life, (3) to political organization in the urban-based centralized state, (4) to the shift from pastoral to agrarian culture which economically underpinned the rise of cities.’ If anything these real studies illuminate the transitioning confusion from the Axial Age (the era when the great-prophets/teachers of the modern-day’s religions were beginning their dispensations) and we have the relics of those ideas preserved in our literature.” [Dion Oliver Peoples, “Slavoj Žižek’s Interpretation of ‘Buddhism.’” The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Universities (JIABU). Volume 3, 2012. Pages 107-144.]

“God, what does this mean? The point—the Lacanian point of this is that in a way the moment we speak we unconsciously believe in God. It is our speech which creates God. God is here the moment we talk. Or to quote Talmud, a passage, ‘You have made me into a single entity in this world, for it is written, here O Israel the Lord is our God the Lord is one and I shall make you into a single entity in the world.’ This Talmud formula exemplifies the idea of God kept alive by subjects’ incessant activity.” [Slavoj Žižek. “Slavoj Žižek: God Without the Sacred: The Book of Job, the First Critique of Ideology.” LIVE from the New York Public Library. Paul Holdengräber, interviewer. November 9th, 2010. Page 23. September 23rd, 2015.]

“This paper elaborates on the divine God through the Lacanian concept of ex-istence. While avoiding the various possibilities of interpreting the ex-sistence of God (imaginary, symbolic…), this article will focus on the ex-sistence of God in the practice of love. We should not understand the love for God, but the love for the neighbours, as announced by Jesus Christ.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Some Thoughts on the Divine Ex-sistence.” Abstract. Crisis & Critique. Volume 2, issue 1. Pages 13-34.]

“Perhaps the clearest indication of the gap that separates Christianity from Buddhism is the difference in their respective triads. That is to say, in their respective histories, each divided itself into three main strands.” [Slavoj Žižek. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2012. Page 108.]

“A profoundly religious friend once commented on the subtitle of a book of mine, ‘the perverse core of Christianity’: ‘I fully agree with you here! I believe in God, but I find repulsive and deeply disturbing all the twist of celebrating sacrifice and humiliation, of redemption through suffering, of God organizing his own son’s killing by men. Can’t we get Christianity without this perverse core?’ I couldn’t bring myself to answer him: ‘But the point of my book is exactly the opposite one: what I want is all those perverse twists of redemption through suffering, dying of God, etc., but without God!’” [Slavoj Žižek, “The Atheist Wager.” Political Theology. Volume 11, issue 1, January 2010. Pages 136-140.]

“One can argue that atheism is truly thinkable only within monotheism ….

“… what if the affinity between monotheism and atheism demonstrates not that atheism depends on monotheism, but that monotheism itself prefigures atheism within the field of religion – its God is from the very (Jewish) beginning a dead one, in clear contrast with the pagan gods who irradiate cosmic vitality. Insofar as the truly materialist axiom is the assertion of primordial multiplicity, the One which precedes this multiplicity can only be Zero itself. No wonder, then, that only in Christianity – as the only truly consequent monotheism – god himself turns momentarily into an atheist.”

[Slavoj Žižek, “Towards a Materialist Theology.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Volume 12, number 1, April 2007. Pages 19-26.]

“As is well known, Jacques Lacan claimed that psychoanalytic practice teaches us to turn around [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky’s dictum: ‘If there is no God, then everything is prohibited.’ This reversal is hard to swallow for our moral common sense: in an otherwise sympathetic review of a book on Lacan, a Slovene Leftist newspaper rendered Lacan’s version as: ‘Even if there is no God, not everything is permitted!’—a benevolent vulgarity, changing Lacan’s provocative reversal into a modest assurance that even we godless atheists respect some ethical limits ….” [Slavoj Žižek in Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević. God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2012. Page 44.]

“… what about the Buddhist figure of bodhisattva who, out of love for the not-yet-enlightened suffering humanity, postpones his own salvation to help others on the way towards it? Does bodhisattva not stand for the highest contradiction: is not the implication of his gesture that love is higher than salvation? So why still call salvation salvation? And, what we find at the end of this road is atheism – not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but insight into the irrelevance of the divine ….

“… we are never in a position to directly choose between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is located within the field of belief. ‘Atheism’ (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserable pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him (or who ‘rebel against God’…). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question itself is irrelevant.”

[Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Bible and Critical Theory. Volume 1, number 1, December 2004. Pages 1-14.]

“The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions….

“The turn towards an emancipatory enthusiasm takes place only when the traumatic truth is not only accepted in a disengaged way, but is fully lived: ‘Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!’ …

“The present book is thus a book of struggle, following Paul’s surprisingly relevant definition: ‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers … of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens’ (Ephesians 6: 12). Or, translated into today’s language: ‘Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it.’ To engage in this struggle … better to take the risk and engage in fidelity to a Truth-Event, even if it ends in catastrophe, than to vegetate in the eventless utilitarian-hedonist survival of what [Friedrich Wilhelm] Nietzsche [MP3 audio file] called the ‘last men.’”

[Slavoj Žižek. Living in the End Times. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2011. Kindle edition.]

“Nowadays, as in former eras, there is a certain amount of posturing and grandstanding about economic oppression and inequality, often resulting in half-baked proposals about combating the new global regime of virtualized and highly financialized capital that has come to be known imprecisely as ‘neoliberalism.’ But the ‘psycho-spiritual’ dimensions of both the nature of such oppression and the trajectories of emancipation are all too frequently shunted aside. Just as classical critical theory tackled these kinds of issues that orthodox forms of political radicalism had dismissed as inconsequential, so a new critical theology is summoned as well to address them squarely and consistently. One contemporary figure who is not routinely classified as part of the ‘new critical theory,’ but whose work has momentous ramifications for supplying the ‘global’ component to an emergent critical theology, is Ulrich Beck. I briefly discussed his contributions to the debates over post-secularism, but we also must regard him as providing some real heft to the idea of critical theology in a genuinely global context.…

“What I have termed the ‘dialogical’ logos of a new critical theology, the procedural ‘theo-logic’ that emanates from the ‘axiomatic’ logos of the Word made flesh, therefore becomes the only kind of ‘critical’ rationality that can successfully navigate the topography of intersecting power relations that have left the political architecture of the nation-state historically in the lurch. We are all wayfarers, and at the same time we are all ‘stripped naked’— so to speak— when we come face-to-face and communicate with each other in our itinerant voyagings and concurrences. A new, global critical theology would therefore be cosmopolitan in [Ulrich] Beck’s pivotal sense. It would not be some overreaching and disinterested surveillance of vast and turbid transnational hoi polloi. The question of identity in such a global critical theology gives pride of place to the recognition and reciprocal incorporation of difference into the formation of a thousand engaged ‘critical’ subjectivities arising from the inescapable intersubjectivity of a world without national borders and static cultural boundaries for which the venerable science of ‘politics,’ even at the international level, becomes meaningless.”

[Carl A. Raschke. Critical Theology: Introducing an Agenda for an Age of Global Crisis. Downer’s Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic imprint of InterVarsity Press. 2016. Kindle edition.]

“What is the future of theology in the midst of rapid geopolitical and economic change?

“Carl A. Raschke contends that two options from the last century—crisis theology and critical theory—do not provide the resources needed to address the current global crisis. Both of these perspectives remained distant from the messiness and unpredictability of life. Crisis theology spoke of the wholly other God, while critical theory spoke of universal reason. These ideas aren’t tenable after postmodernism and the return of religion, which both call for a dialogical approach to God and the world. Rashke’s new critical theology takes as its starting point the biblical claim that the Word became flesh—a flesh that includes the cultural, political and religious phenomena that shape contemporary existence.

“Drawing on recent reformulations of critical theory by Slavoj Žiže, Alain Badiou and post-secularists such as Jürgen Habermas, Raschke introduces an agenda for theological thinking accessible to readers unfamiliar with this literature. In addition, the book explores the relationship between a new critical theology and current forms of political theology. Written with the passion of a manifesto, Critical Theology presents the critical and theological resources for thinking responsibly about the present global situation.”

[Editor. Critical Theology: Introducing an Agenda for an Age of Global Crisis. Publisher’s abstract. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press Academic. 2016. Retrieved on July 30th, 2016.]

“For [Slavoj] Žižek, ‘true’ materialism has to ‘go through the Christian experience,’ since Christianity ‘opens up the space for thinking’ the nonexistence of the big Other, the symbolic Order, the Master-Signifier, God, Father, Big Brother, State, that which provides the illusion of full Meaning. It does so because, for Žižek, Christianity is ‘the religion of a God who dies.’ In this atheological schema, God’s total self-emptying at the Incarnation and self-abandonment at the Crucifixion is the foundation of the community of behevers as God (the Holy Spirit). Christ therefore becomes a Lacanian vanishing mediator in a dual sense, a doubly necessary intermediary that vanishes in the very moment of its mediations: through Christ, God the Father passes into the Holy Spirit, and the human community passes into a ‘new spiritual stage.’” [Katharine Sarah Moody, “Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Žižek’s Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis.” Political Theology. Volume 13, issue 2, April 2012. Pages 183-199.]

“Critical theology is in many ways the ongoing twenty first-century legacy of so-called pomo [postmodern] theology. Postmodern theology, which started off in the 1980s as an effort to develop an immediate theological application for the tremendously influential philosophy (at the time) of Jacques Derrida, gradually became an extension of what Hent DeVries termed in the late 1990s the ‘religious turn’ in continental philosophy as a whole.…

“With the revival of political theology … has come a profound new interest in so-called critical theory, a term once used exclusively for the work of the writings of the Frankfurt School, which flourished from the late 1920s until after World War II, but in the last two decades has come to be used for a wide variety of contemporary theorists who draw on the discourses and explicit sociopolitical critiques found in continental philosophy (as well as psychoanalysis). That latest iteration is often known as the ‘new critical theory.’ The interdisciplinary interest in critical theory is also expanding rapidly in the present college and university environments. My own institution just this past year inaugurated such a curriculum because of student demand.”

[Carl A. Raschke. “Conversation with the Author: IVP Academic editor David Congdon asks author Carl A. Raschke about his new book, Critical Theology.” IVP Academic imprint of InterVarsity Press. 2016. Retrieved on July 30th, 2016.]

“According to [Slavoj] Žižek, atheism is an intrinsic part of Christianity because Christianity is, as Chesterton stated, the religion in which God himself becomes an atheist.… This view of Žižek is of course a result of his Hegelianism. But, next to Žižek‟s faithfulness to Hegel’s basic scheme, there is no justification for this transition from God the Son sharing the atheist‟s experience on the Cross to the death of God the Father – unless one limits the Father of Christ to the God qua ‘secret Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us to be a meaningless catastrophe’ and the ‘transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts’ who is discredited by the case of Job.” [Frederiek Depoortere, “The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism.” Expositions. Volume 4, numbers 1 and 2, 2010. Pages 105-113.]

“According to [Thomas J. J.] Altizer, God is not absent. He is not merely in eclipse. It’s not simply a question of language and terminology. The problem of images (whether God is ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ or ‘down there’) is really beside the point. God is dead. He died in history, on the Cross. God once existed; he no longer exists. And it is time for Christians to recognize this fact. We are liberated from the power and restraining force of a transcendent God, a God who rules and a God who judges. We are liberated for a life of total engagement in the terrestrial and profane order. Christians can now be secular radicals because God is dead.” [Richard P. McBrien, “Radical Theology: The Honest-to-God to God-Is-Dead.” Commonweal. September 23rd, 1966. Pages 605-608.]

“Only when God is dead, can Being begin in every Now. Eternal Recurrence is neither a cosmology nor a metaphysical idea, it is [Friedrich] Nietzsche’s symbol of the deepest affirmation existence, of Yes-saying; accordingly, Eternal Recurrence symbolic portrait of the truly contemporary man, who dares to live in our time, in our history, in our existence.

“We must observe that Eternal Recurrence is a dialectical inversion of the biblical category of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God makes incarnate a transcendent Wholly Other, a Wholly Other that radically reverses the believer’s existence in both the being and the values of the Old Aeon of history, and makes possible even now a participation in the New Aeon of grace. So likewise the ‘existential’ truth of Eternal Recurrence shatters the power of the old order of history, transforming transcendence into immanence, and thereby making eternity incarnate in every Now. Eternal Recurrence is the dialectical antithesis of the Christian God, the creature becomes the Creator when the Center is everywhere.”

[Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Theology and the Death of God.” The Centennial Review. Volume 8, number 2, spring 1964. Pages 129-146.]

“I propose to examine one such frontier with the purpose of ascertaining whether or not it is closed to the Catholic thinker: the possibility of an atheistic or death-of-God theology. Many critics have charged that a death-of-God theology can have no possible ground in the life of the Church, that it ignores or simply negates the Christian tradition, and that it collapses theology into a naturalistic or humanistic anthropology. Now if these charges are true I can see no possibility of a Catholic death-of-God theology, nor for that matter could I then see the possibility of any form of Christian atheism. But I believe them to be untrue, and I shall approach these charges by way of taking up the question of the inherent possibility of a Catholic atheistic theology.” [Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Catholic Philosophy and the Death of God.” CrossCurrents. Volume 17, number 3, summer 1967. Pages 271-282.]

“… when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: ‘Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!’” [Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Adrian Del Caro, translator. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, editors. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Page 5.]

“After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!” [Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro, translators. Bernard Williams, editor. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Page 109.]

“New monasticism is a way to live this mystery, to breathe this primal breath. It is both a call and a response: a call to prayer, to the interior journey, and also a response, a path to follow. But rather than the tolling of the monastery bells for matins and vespers, the canonical hours and strict observance of prayers, … [one may consider] a set of principles, of blessed simplicity, contemplation, spiritual friendship, and an awareness of the inner values that belong to the core of what it really means to be a human being. They also stress the grounded need for psychological work, an essential part of the transformative journey that takes one toward spiritual maturity. This is an organic, evolving vision that speaks to the need of the time, of a moment in our human history when the spirit is coming alive in a new way. It is a doorway to walk through into sacred space.” [Rory McEntree and Adam Bucko. New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. 2015. Kindle edition.]

“As a surprising new development that has been increasing in visibility and influence within American evangelicalism, the new monasticism is interesting in its own right, despite having remained largely invisible to mainstream academe. However, while conducting interviews and site visits and analyzing the books and literature being produced by emerging neo-monastic leaders, it quickly became apparent that the theological and political standpoints being developed by neo-monastic evangelicals were of great theoretical and historical significance with respect to American evangelicalism as a whole. Most notably perhaps, neo-monastic evangelicals are highly critical of conservative evangelicalism and its deep connections to the Christian Right and conservative Republican Party politics. Their holistic communitarian approach to Christian spirituality is a significant break with dominant expressions of twentieth-century American evangelicalism—which have been marked strong tendencies toward theological individualism and political conservatism—and requires special attention and explanation. Apart from wondering at its existence or explaining it away as the unfortunate accommodation of orthodox evangelicalism to modernity among well-educated evangelicals, the evangelical left and its allies have been largely ignored by scholars of evangelical religion in America. This book joins a small but growing list of studies that provide some remedy for that neglect.” [Wes Markofski. New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Page 29.]

“A representative of a new monastic community considers each of these twelve characteristics as follows: (1) relocation to the abandoned places of Empire; (2) sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us; (3) hospitality to the stranger; (4) lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation; (5) humble submission to Christ’s body, the church; (6) intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate; (7) nurturing common life among members of intentional community; (8) support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children; (9) geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life; (10) care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies; (11) peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18; and (12) commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.” [Erik C. Carter, “The New Monasticism: A Literary Introduction.” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care. Volume 5, number 2, fall 2012. Pages 268-284.]

“New monasticism would seem, by its very name, to be an embrace of the more permanent, stable pattern of life inherent to traditional monasticism, one that holds as an ideal a lifelong, solemn profession. Such is the witness of the Community of Jesus, which permits people to test their vocation for a trial period (postulancy, novitiate, and simple profession), but which is rooted and sustained by the commitment of its solemnly vowed members. On the other hand, in intentional communities such as Bonhoeffer House, there is no such similar embrace of traditional monasticism’s ideal around permanence and stability. These communities are organized on the premise that Christians can, and perhaps even should, live together intentionally for a time of no small significance but also not for a lifetime, so that they may be formed by that experience in order to better and more faithfully serve in future communities and contexts.” [Robert Casey Shobe. New Monasticism and the Parish: An Examination of the Intersection of Intentional Christian Communities and Congregations. Doctor of Ministry dissertation. University of the South. Sewanee, Tennessee. May, 2016. Pages 88-89.]

“… [There is] a social movement within Christianity called New Monasticism. New Monastics—a sect of the growing Emergent Church movement—feel called to relocate to impoverished urban areas and define their faith in terms of social justice outreach, racial reconciliation, and concern for the poor. Since the early 2000s, New Monastics have been migrating to urban areas and forming intentional communities—concentrating mostly on Rust Belt cities that have faced devastation from the loss of industrial manufacturing jobs ….” [Chhaya Kolavalli. Questioning the American Dream: New Monastic Attempts to Restructure the U.S. Economy. M.A. thesis. University of Kansas. Lawrence, Kansas. 2014. Page 2.]

“Today, St. Francis’ life and example has found a new champion within the American Protestant tradition. Promoters of the popular “new monasticism” movement that has recently become a buzzword in the evangelical community have often invoked St. Francis and his friars specifically as a guiding historical example for what they seek to accomplish. After centuries of Protestant rejection and avoidance of the Christian monastic tradition, this young movement, consisting of small groups engaging in communal living and radical activism across the country, has begun to consciously rehabilitate the practice of monasticism within the evangelical Protestant fold, pointing to St. Francis and other historical examples to describe their efforts to form an alternative church culture that adheres most directly to the apostolic life of the New Testament.” [Kimberly C. Kennedy. “God’s Recurring Dream”: Assessing the New Monastic Movement through a Historical Comparison. M.A. thesis. Olivet Nazarene University. Bourbonnais, Illinois. August, 2012. Page 6.]

“At first the connection seems far-fetched. Could any two groups of Christians be more different? Evangelicals have their origins in the Protestant Reformation; Catholic and Orthodox monks have their origins in the pre-Reformation medieval era. Monks live lives of ordered submission to established tradition; evangelicals live their lives devoted to more individual pursuits, always open to the new. But the New Monasticism movement has opened a new chapter in the relations of these previously estranged groups.

“On the one hand the New Monasticism movement has emerged from the very heart of the American evangelical community. But on the other hand it is, as its name indicates, deeply connected to the pre-Reformation monastic movement, and to roots that reach back to the very earliest centuries of Christianity.

“For me this connection is a deeply personal one. I grew up in the evangelical community in the 1940s and 50s. My father was a revivalist, as were many of his friends and colleagues who were constantly in and out of our home. We were part of a Mennonite community that was just emerging from an Amish past, but our theology and beliefs were evangelical. Our leaders had been trained in Baptist seminaries.”

[Ivan J. Kauffman, “Evangelicals and Monastics.” Monasticism Old and New. Robert B. Kruschwitz, editor. Waco, Texas: The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University. 2010. Pages 26-32.]

“It is a mark of the success of the conservatives within the church down the centuries that they have been able to construct an ideology which makes a challenge to the status quo appear to be a departure from orthodoxy. But the Christian tradition is itself diverse, and my hope is that a glimpse of some of those texts and movements which bear witness to a very different attitude may reveal the fragility of the conservative ideology and the antecedents of contemporary Christian commitment to social change and greater equality. Identifying the memory of those struggles from the mists of the past is an of feminist theology. The full story of radical Christianity would devote a significant place to the creativity and ingenuity of women through the centuries to make space for themselves in an institution and culture which rapidly became male-dominated. I would like to have been able to include more of this story (and a consideration of the medieval period would have included the prominent role of women like Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila in the mystical tradition). Much valuable work is being done to recover the important role of women as exponents of a submerged but authentic voice of Christian discipleship. The theological outlook of Julian of Norwich and the creative energy of founders of religious orders like Mary Ward are a reminder that the story I have to tell must remain incomplete without adequate treatment of this subject. I can only plead that this is an area where I am still in the process of discovery myself, and at this stage do not feel able to do improve on the excellent work which is now available from women theologians.” [Christopher Rowland. Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers. 1988. Pages 9-10.]

“The intratextual way of dealing with this problem [Biblical hermeneutics] depends heavily on literary considerations. The normative or literal meaning must be consistent with the kind of text it is taken to be by the community for which it is important. The meaning must not be esoteric: not something behind, beneath, or in front of the text; not something that the text reveals, discloses, implies. or suggests to those with extraneous metaphysical, historical, or experiential interests. It must rather be what the text says in terms of the communal language of which the text is an instantiation. A legal document should not be treated in quasi-kabbalistic fashion as first of all a piece of expressive symbolism (though it may secondarily be that also); nor should the Genesis account of creation be turned nondeterministically into science; nor should one tum a realistic narrative (which a novel also can be) into history (or, alternatively, as the historical critic is want to do, into a source of clues for the reconstruction of history). If the literary character of the story of Jesus, for example, is that of utilizing, as realistic narratives do, the interaction of purpose and circumstance to render the identity description of an agent, then it is Jesus’ identity as thus rendered, not his historicity, existential significance, or metaphysical status, which is the literal and theologically controlling meaning of the tale. The implications of the story for determining the metaphysical status, or existential significance, or historical career of Jesus Christ may have varying degrees of theological importance, but they are not determinative. The believer, so an intratextual approach would maintain. is not told primarily to be conformed to a reconstructed Jesus of history …, nor to a metaphysical Christ of faith (as in much of the propositionalistt radition), nor to an Abba experience of God …, nor to an agapeic way of being in the world …, but he or she is rather to be conformed to the Jesus Christ depicted in the narrative. An intratextual reading tries to derive the interpretive framework that designates the theologically controlling sense from the literary structure of the text itself.

“It is easy to see how theological descriptions of a religion may on this view need to be materially diverse even when the formal criterion of faithfulness remains the same. The primary focus is not on God’s being in itself, for that is not what the text is about, but on how life is to be lived and reality construed in the light of God’s character as an agent as this is depicted in the stories of Israel and of Jesus. Life, however, is not the same in catacombs and space shuttles, and reality is different for, let us say, Piatonists and Whiteheadians. Catacomb dwellers and astronauts might rightly emphasis diverse aspects of the biblical accounts of God’s character and action in describing their respective situations. Judging by catacomb paintings, the first group often saw themselves as sheep in need of a shepherd, while the second group would perhaps be well advised to stress God’s grant to human beings of stewardship over planet Earth. Similarly, Platonic and Whiteheadian differences over the nature of reality lead to sharp disagreements about the proper characterization of God’s metaphysical properties, while antimetaphysicians, in turn, argue that no theory of divine attributes is consistent with the character of the biblical God.”

[George A. Lindbeck. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press. 1984. Pages 120-121.]

“George Lindbeck’s seminal work The Nature of Doctrine … launched the postliberal movement and expressed sentiments that gathered together the theologians who did not share the revisionist bias in liberation theologies. Nonetheless, practice was central feature here as well. Lindbeck’s famous example in The Nature of Doctrine of a crusader cleaving the skull of an infidel while shouting ‘Christus est dominus,’ functions here as an example of the fact that the truth of a proposition is not tied only to the meaning of the employed words separated from the use of the words and acts, which together form the interpretative context for the proposition. In this case, the act (of cleaving the skull) attaches a false type of lordship to Christ because the meaning of the words is expressed in the use of the words.” [Olli-Pekka Vainio, “Re-Emergence of Practice in Contemporary Theology. Aspects and Prospects.” Perichoresis. Volume 9, number 2, 2011. Pages 183-200.]

“Postliberal theology, especially in terms of its origins, has often been associated with what is called the ‘Yale School,‘ referring to former Yale Divinity School professors, most notably, Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Indeed, this has some merit. But if postliberal theology depends solely on Yale for its existence, then, as George Hunsinger notes, ‘postliberal theology is in trouble’. As we will see, it is a broader movement than its professorial advocates from Yale. Postliberal theology has always been more a loose connection of narrative theological interests than it is some monolithic agenda. It represents an overarching concern for the renewal of Christian confession over theological methodology. Rather than reliance on a notion of correlative common experience, postliberal theology moves toward the local or particular faith description of the community of the church.

“The ‘postliberal’ to which we will be referring in this book will always be theological or philosophical in focus, rather than political. Within the study of theology itself, another distinction must also be made. When used as an unhyphenated word, ‘postliberal,’ it will refer to the movement discussed in this book. The hyphenated form of the word ‘post-liberal’ refers to an earlier, historically specific neo-orthodox rejection of classic theological liberalism during the years before and after World War Two. This is not to say that there are no common threads between the historical situatedness of ‘post-liberalism’ and the later ‘postliberal’ critique of liberal theology as developed by Hans Frei, George Lindbeck and others. Both post-liberal and postliberal theologies reject efforts to modernize Christiandoctrines to make them palatable to contemporary scientific or rational mindsets. Both are concerned with the retrieval and maintenance of classic Christian doctrines and practices of the Church. Nevertheless, due the historical context, the nuanced diff erences among the authors, along with current postliberal insights with respect to postmodernity, we believe that making this distinction between the two is important to maintain.”

[Ronald T. Michener. Postliberal Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2013. Pages 3-4.]

“… a ‘modern’ believer has to affirm that the history with the crucifixion, and the reality of the resurrection faith of those who have confessed him as Lord. This of course was counter to the interpretation of the New Testament texts by the vast majority of ‘pre-modern’ Christian readers all of whom, according to the demythologizing version, would have to be consigned by definition to the ‘mythical’ state of mind, because they read the resurrection narratives as applying to Jesus and go on furthermore to affirm that application as the truth. In the demythologizing view, the real textual subject matter of the New Testament narratives is the birth of faith after Jesus’ death, and not the historical Jesus himself; and the extratextual reality of the resurrection is the representation of Jesus wherever the life of faith is truly proclaimed and accepted.” [Hans W. Frei, “How It All Began: On the Resurrection of Christ.” Anglican and Episcopal History. Volume 58, number 2, June 1989. Pages 139-145.]

“It is fascinating that of the original and most prominent left-wing Hegelians, only [Karl] Marx remained loyal to the great master and continued as a dialectical thinker. This fact is perhaps related to the crucial discovery which Marx made, that religion is not the basic problem of man but only its ideological symptom, and similarly, therefore, that dialectical thinking is basically neither theology nor (except at the symptomatic level) anti-theology. This discovery, in turn, is probably one of the reasons why Christian theologians, when reasoning in the dialectical mode, have found that in long run critical conversation with Marxism is more fascinating than concern with [Ludwig] Feuerbach, important though he is to a limited extent. If one is going to base his critique of Christianity on a critique of ideology, and on a comprehensive dialectic of man in culture as the material subject of thought and change, then it is well to start with a doctrine of man that is more than simply religious or anti-religious.” [Hans W. Frei, “Feuerbach and Theology.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Volume 35, number 3, September 1967. Pages 250-256.]

“… [There is a] very constant operation to find that fit between textuality and truth. The Reformers saw the place where that fit was realized in the constant reconstitution of the church where the word is rightly preached and where the sacraments are rightly administered. There is where that fit takes place, and there alone. And there without any guarantees. It is a very straight path. It is a tightrope walk towards a very narrow gate. One constantly has to look with unease on the right where referential truth theories abound or, at a more humble level, where neo-conservatives beckon us. Or, we look to the left, where pragmatists tell us that we have no problem of truth or, at a more mundane level, where liberationists explode. And in between is the witness of the church within the text of the Bible.” [Hans W. Frei, “Conflicts in Interpretation.” Theology Today. Volume 49, number 3, October 1992. Pages 334-356.]

“… a heresy is often the sign that orthodoxy has sacrified the elements of mystery, and along with it tentativeness or open-endedness, to an oversimplified consistency. Jesus’ followers in the early church did not doubt that the work of saving men was the work of omnipotence. But it is equally true and far more easily forgotten that they believed this power to be mysteriously congruent with Jesus’ all too human helplessness and lack of power in the face of the terrible chain of events leading to his death, once that chain had begun to be wound around him. We find these two apparently contradictory tendencies converging in the gospel narrative. To make them harmonious by means of an explanation or theory of Jesus’ passion would be very difficult indeed; but in the story – the descriptive and interpretive retelling of the events – they fit together naturally and easily. We are given hints of his abiding power, of the abiding initiative that remains in his hands even at the moments when he is most evidently helpless, when acted upon rather than agent. But his helplessness is at least equally manifest and genuine. The two are never merged; one may say both that they coexist as well as that transition through circumstances from one to the other.” [Hans W. Frei, Amos N. Wilder, Daniel D. Williams, and Ian D. Kingston Siggins, “Theological Reflections on the Accounts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.” The Christian Scholar. Volume 49, number 4, winter 1966. Pages 263-315.]

“Remarkably, the theological discourse surrounding Hans Frei and postliberal theology has continued for nearly thirty years since Frei’s death. This is due not only to the complex and provocative character of Frei’s work, nor only to his influence upon an array of thinkers who went on to shape the theological field in their own right. It is just as indebted to the critical responses that his thinking continues to inspire.” [Jason A. Springs,  A Wittgenstein for Postliberal Theologians.” Modern Theology. Volume 32, issue 4, October 2016. Pages 622-658.]

“In the contemporary situation, theology is one place carved out where there is more freedom to explore the back-eddies of tradition and the implications of marginal writings and practices. I understand constructive theology to be a spiritual practice as well as an academic discipline. As an academic practice, it interprets the multiple textual traditions that form the Christian canon. As a constructive practice it also presses toward more adequate interpretations by surfacing the distortions of patriarchy, racism, or ethnocentrism that become sedimented into the institutional life of the church. It reimagines the root symbols and concepts that structure Christian thought and practice in ways that make sense in contemporary society. It is, on the one hand, an aspect of interpretation of doctrinal traditions and is in that sense intimately related to the church. On the other hand, it has a kind of independence from the church’s authority structures. In represents that part of Christian practice that engages in critique and that creatively carries Christian thought forward through time. All religions have some mechanisms for mediating authorities that enjoy sacred worth with the flux of human history and the plurality of spiritual needs. In Christianity, theology is one such mechanism. This is perhaps why theologians are sometimes beatified and sometimes burned.” [Wendy Farley, “Duality and Non-Duality in Christian Practice: Reflections on the Benefits of Buddhist-Christian Dialogue for Constructive Theology.” Buddhist-Christian Studies. Volume 31, 2011. Pages 135-146.]

“Constructive theology has been from the start enmeshed in varieties of radical hermeneutics. This allows Christian faith to attract intellectuals and to work with secular activists; and believe me, Christianity without its intellectuals is not going to be any appealingly populist affair. The more theology absorbs the methods of deconstruction and pluralism, the more the opposition between secularism and religion can itself be deconstructed. And as Jim Wallis has pointed out, ‘the secular left will give up its hostility to religion and spirituality, or it will die.’ And this is politically crucial. For that hostility contributes to an evangelical stereotype about Godless humanists, etc. But the more we heal that hostility, the less we constructive theologians sound like Christians to evangelicals.” [John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller, “Theopoetic/Theopolitic.” CrossCurrents. Winter 2007. Pages 105-111.]

“My proposal to understand and practice constructive theology as a discourse of leadership has taken shape primarily through my sense of the strengths and shortcomings of other theological methods (e.g., postliberal, revisionist, feminist, and liberation). With postliberals (who, with George Lindbeck, think of religion as analogous to a cultural system), I believe Christian theologies need to move away from the foundationalist models that emerged out of 20ᵗʰ century anxiety over science and the social sciences. Postliberals know that religion is more akin to political or cultural life than to science or particular forms of knowledge. Lindbeck’s understanding of doctrine as grammatical rules avoids the rigidity of dogmatism while acknowledging that theology must continually address changing circumstances in order to be convincing.” [Joe Bessler, “Theological Leadership: A Rhetorical Defense of Constructive Theology.” Encounter. Volume 72, number 2, winter 2012. Pages 1-29.]

“… we realize that in addition to the weight and shaping influence of tradition and history on our work there are the facts of our contemporary scene that distinguish this time from those of our predecessors. Most notably, our awareness of Christianity’s ambiguous impact on culture expands the boundaries of constructive theology’s audience beyond those who identify themselves as Christians. Concepts of God have political and ethical consequences that reach far beyond the religious and communal bounds of those who espouse them. Western countries and individuals have often invoked God’s name to justify their actions. We must consider the ethical and political implications inherent in any constructed concepts of God. Since such claims affect Christians and non-Christians, Christian theologians must consider the practical consequences of their claims for adherents of other religious and secular traditions.” [Ellen T. Armour, Paul E. Capetz, Don H. Compier, and Laurel C. Schneider, “God.” Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach To Classical Themes. Paul Lakeland and Serena Jones, editors. Minneapolis, Minnesota: ortress Press imprint of Augsburg Fortress. 2005. Kindle edition.]

“I find it more meaningful and important to involve Paul’s theology of Israel for the sake of God’s mission as fruitful dialogue between the church and Israel in which mission as constructive theology enriches itself in understanding the gospel in light of God’s word of covenant and blessing in a thicker manner. Insofar as Jesus Christ comes to us through Israel, the church’s dialogue with the Jewish community remains an indispensable part of the shape of the church’s participation in God’s mission as it is involved in Israel in both the biblical and post-biblical contexts. Paul’s theology of mission must occupy a significant role in the Church’s relationship with the Jewish community.” [Paul S. Chung. Reclaiming Mission as Constructive Theology: Missional Church and World Christianity. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“… one generation after the event, one can still say—or one can already say—that what is called the literature of the Holocaust does not exist, cannot exist. It is a contradiction in terms, as is the philosophy, the theology, the psychology of the Holocaust. Auschwitz negates all systems, opposes all doctrines. They cannot but diminish the experience which lies beyond our reach. Ask any survivor, he will tell you; he who has not lived the event will never know it. And he who went through it, will not reveal it—not really, not entirely. Between his memory and its reflection there is a wall—and it cannot be pierced. The past belongs to the dead, and the survivor does not recognize himself in the words linking him to them. A novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka; a novel about Treblinka is about blasphemy—is blasphemy. For Treblinka means death—absolute death—death of language and of the imagination. Its mystery is doomed to remain intact.” [Elie Wiesel, “Art and Culture After the Holocaust.” CrossCurrents. Volume 26, number 3, fall 1976. Pages 258-269.]

“To a surprising degree the answers given by the Holocaust theologians are the same answers as those to be found in earlier traditional sources. Many of them – those we have described under the headings of narrative exegesis, liturgy, the assertion of meaning and value, the imperative of survival, and tikkun [Hebrew/ʿIḇəriyṯ, תִּקּוּן, tiqqūn, ‘repairing’] – are varieties of one of those answers, that of redemption through suffering, worked out with new insights arising from modem psychological and sociological perspectives and applied, often with great sensitivity, to the present situation of the Jewish people.” [Norman Solomon, “Jewish Holocaust Theology.” The Way. Volume 37, number 3, July 1997. Pages 242-253.]

“In this paper I propose that the category of paradigmatic thinking be applied to the reflections about the Nazi persecutions of the Jews during the Holocaust written by one of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis who strove to provide a meaningful religious interpretation of the assault while the events were still unfolding. Employing this category in the analysis of the wartime writings of Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich of Transylvania (1863–1944) shows the intricate conceptual structure that enabled him and similar traditionally oriented thinkers to uphold the fundamental tenets of covenantal theology in spite of the historical events that threatened to disrupt it.” [Barbara Krawcowicz, “Paradigmatic Thinking and Holocaust Theology.” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy. Volume 22, issue 2, 2014. Pages 164-189.]

“… [Elie] Wiesel has created a mouthpiece for his theology. It is a unique Holocaust theology, a theology of questions without answers; one that equates knowledge of the depths of man’s depravity with knowledge of the heights of man’s wisdom.” [Peter Manseau, “Revising Night: Elie Wiesel and the Hazards of Holocaust Theology.” CrossCurrents. Volume 56, number 3, fall 2006. Pages 387-399.]

“The need for ongoing human participation in the quest for redemption is the context of the volume you have before you. Radical Judaism means a reframing of our contemporary perspective on the great questions, a leap forward that shows we are not afraid to be challenged by contemporary reality, while we remain devoted to hearing the greater challenge of God’s voice calling out ‘Where are you?’ anew in our age. This means a Judaism that takes seriously its own claims of ongoing Creation and revelation, even as it recognizes all the challenges to them. To ‘take them seriously’ in our day cannot mean simply holding fast to them without question, dismissing the challenges of science and scholarship or seeking to avoid dealing with them. It means rather to rethink our most foundational concepts–God, Torah, and Israel and Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, to ask how they might work in the context of what we really believe in our age, and thus how they might speak to seekers in this century.” [Arthur Green. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition. The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2010. Page 189.]

“… [Here] is the moment for radical Judaism. We understand that all God can do is to call out to us, now as always. All we can do is respond—or not. The consequence of our failure will be monumental. God is indeed in need of humans; and we humans are in need of guidance, seeking out the hand of a divine Partner, one who ‘speaks’ from deep within the heart, but also from deep within our tradition and its wisdom.” [Arthur Green. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition. The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2010. Page 192.]

“Reines, Alvin Jay rabbi, religion.…

“Born: September 12, 1926.…

“Certification: Ordained rabbi, 1952.…

“Death: Died Nov. 14, 2004.”

[Editor, “Reines, Alvin Jay.” Who was who in America: With world notables. New Providence, New Jersey: Marquis Who’s Who LLC. 2016. Credo Reference (online).]

“… the Jewish layperson in the Polydox Jewish Confederation has an equal right to that of clergy members in determining the principles of the Confederation. Not only is this principle logically necessary, but it is pragmatically wise. There can be little question that the chasm between the American Jewish instsituional religions and the American Jews has been widened, if not brought about, by the failure to include laypersons in the decision-making processes of American Jewish religious communities.” [Alvin J. Reines, “Crisis, Polydoxy, and Survival.” Polydoxy. 1978. No pagination.]

“Polydoxy is a religious or philosophy-of-life ideology whose essential principle is that every person possesses an inherent right to ultimate self-authority over her or his psyche and body. This principle will be referred to as the ‘Polydox Principle.’ Accordingly, every person possesses an ultimate right to determine the religious or philosophic beliefs she or he will accept, the observances she or he will keep, and the morality she or he will follow.

“A polydox community is one in which persons come together in a formal relationship to pursue in association with one another their commitment to the Polydox Principle. The basic structure of a polydox community can be defined in terms of a covenant that is named the ‘Freedom Covenant.’ A person who is party to the Freedom Covenant pledges to affirm and respect the ultimate right to self-authority of every other party to the covenant in return for the other parties’ pledges to affirm and respect her or his own. A corollary of the Freedom Covenant is that each party’s freedom ends where the other parties’ freedom begins. Membership in a polydox community consists in entering into the Freedom Covenant of the community.”

[Alvin J. Reines, “The Polydox Confederation.” Religious Humanism. 1987. Pages 84-88.]

“In the polydox religion, freedom of the individual religionist is ultimate. It is the freedom of the individual to choose among beliefs and practices that is established by the polydox community, not, as in orthodoxy, the beliefs and practices that the individual is compelled to choose. Polydox religionists have the right granted them by their community to accept belief only if it accords with their views of reality; to practice morality according to their individual consciences; and to follow only such ritual as is found meaningful. The rights and limits of the religionist’s freedom in the polydox community can be epitomized in terms of a covenant, a freedom covenant. Every member of the polydox community pledges to affirm the religious freedom of all other members in return for their pledges to affirm his own. Each person’s freedom, consequently, ends where the other person’s freedom begins.” [Alvin J. Reines, “The Term Polydoxy.” Polydoxy. 1975. No pagination.]

“Polydox Judaism is a religion of ultimate personal freedom. In Polydox Judaism, persons have the right to accept only beliefs of whose truth they are convinced, and to keep only practices whose observance they find meaningful. All other beliefs and practices may rightfully be rejected. Accordingly, adherents of Polydox Judaism may legitimately and properly hold different views regarding the word God, the nature of revelation, or the existence of an afterlife. The fundamental principle of Polydoxy may be stated in terms of a covenant, the Freedom Covenant: Fvery adherent of Polydox Judaism pledges to affirm the freedom of all other adherents in return for their pledges to affirm her or his own, Equally binding in Polydox Judaism is the corollary of the Freedom Covenant: Every person’s freedom ends where the other person’s freedom begins.” [Alvin J. Reines, “Polydox Judaism: A Statement.” Journal of Reform Judaism. Fall 1980. Pages 47-55.]

“A polydox philosophy of religious education sets forth the nature and purpose of religious education as viewed from the polydox perspective. Necessary to this exposition is an inquiry into fundamental questions pertaining to five sets of relationships: 1) The relationship regarding religious education between parents and their minor children (‘minors’ are here defined as ‘persons whose parents, or those standing in locus parentis, make their religious decisions for them’); 2) The relationship between adults (‘adults’ are here defined as ‘persons who make their own religious education decisions’) and their religious communities; 3) The relationship between adults and their religious communities’ educational institutions (e.g., all organized educational activities of a religious community, from schools and camps for youngsters to study groups and retreats for adults); 4) The relationship between parents and their religious communities whose educational institutions their minor children attend; 5) The relationship between minor students and the religious educational institutions they attend.” [Alvin J. Reines, “A Polydox Philosophy Of Religious Education.” Polydoxy. 1982. Pages 1-16.]

“Polydoxy is the principle that uudcrlies almost all existing Jewish religious systems: Reformism, Reconstructionism, and Conservatism. They are in de facto if not necessarily du jure agreement on its validity. The beliefs of Orthodox Judaism enumerated above, as well as those of the entire heterogeneous Jewish traditions, when not in conflict with polydox commitment, arc accepted in varying degrees according to personal conviction, The dramatic subjective-existentialist and neo-Orthodox voices within the various Jewish religious communities, which appear to lay down as dogmas beliefs that are based on subjective evidence or no evidence at all, actually express the purely personal opinion of religionists annoying the freedom that is theirs under a polydox religious structure. The ultimate commitment of the modern Jew, as was the commitment of the Jew of the past, is to rationalism; the rationalism that acquires objective evidence for the faith of orthodoxy, the rationalism that turns to polydoxy when the faith of orthodoxy has gone.” [Alvin J. Reines, “Polydoxy and Modern Judaism.” CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly. 1985. Pages 23-29.]

“In a polydox religion, the political structure serves an opposite function from that in an orthodoxy. There is no authoritative and obligatory body of belief and practice that its members must be brought to accept. The only principle required in a polydoxy is the mutual affirmation of one another’s freedom. This freedom, or self-authority, entails the ultimate right of the polydox religionist to determine for himself the beliefs, rituals, liturgy, services, morals and religious education he will accept. The function of the political structure in the polydox community, consequently, is the reverse of that orthodoxy.” [Alvin J. Reines, “Polydox and Orthodox Religious Structures.” Polydoxy. 1986. No pagination.]

“The Orthodox halachic definition of who is a ‘Jew’ is entirely unacceptable on philosophic and moral grounds to any polydox or truly liberal Judaism. Thus for those Reform Jews who understand Reform Judaism to be a polydoxy, the Orthodox definition is clearly unsatisfactory. Yet even for those who maintain Reform is something other than a polydoxy, (although what that “something other” might be has never been demonstrated,) the Orthodox definition cannot be morally defended.” [Alvin J. Reines, “The Name Jew.” Polydoxy. 1977. No pagination.]

“The reason why Reform Judaism requires autarchy of its adherents becomes clear upon considering the conditions necessary for heterarchy. In the state of autarchy, the human person is himself his own authority and the ultimate source of his beliefs, desires, feelings, and actions. This is not to say that a person in the autarchic state cannot and does not seek information and advice from others, rather that the autarchic person retains ultimate authority over himself, and makes the final decisions regarding what he will think and do. In a hierarchic state, however, the person surrenders ultimate authority over himself to some external entity that then has the right to command the person what he is to believe, desire, feel, and do. Needless to say, for a person to surrender his freedom to an authority that commands him what to think and do, such an authority and its commands must exist. Simply because persons may desire hierarchic existence docs not mean they can have hierarchic existence. They must live in a world that provides the authority and commands necessary for authentic heterarchy, and it is this world that Reform Judaism has destroyed.” [Alvin J. Reines, “Reform Judaism: The Shock of Freedom.” HUC Press. 1978. Pages 128-141.]

“To understand the present crisis of existence of the Jewish collectivity, which I have elsewhere termed the ‘silent holocaust,’ and its relation to the Enlightenment with its consequent Emancipation, we must begin with an analysis of the ontology of the psyches of Jews. Such an ontological analysis of the contemporary Jewish collectivity reveals, I believe, that Jews generally possess one of two modes of perspective. A person’s mode of perspective, broadly speaking (that is, omitting details unnecessary for this discussion), is constituted of two primary elements: a self-view of the characteristics constitutive of his being; and a Weltanschauung, his view of the fundamental characteristics of extramental reality.” [Alvin J. Reines, “Ontology, Demography, and the Silent Holocaust.” Judaism. Volume 38, number 4, fall 1989. Pages 478-487.]

“… in any group of people such as a synagogue, there not only exists a diversity of beliefs, values, and actions, but—as we today live in a rapidly changing world—this diversity is appropriate, legitimate, and fundamentally healthy. Dr. [Alvin J.] Reines coined the world “polydoxy” to describe such a group that warmly and openly welcomes the diversity that follows from individual autonomy.” [Anthony D. Holz, “Authority and Religion: The Jewish Philosophy of Alvin J. Reines.” CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly. Winter 2016. No pagination.]

“Jewish philosopher/theologian Alvin Reines has suggested the term ‘polydoxy’ to evoke this compassionate embrace of pluralistic perspectives. In response to what he poses as the ‘impending annihilation’ of the ‘Jewish religious complex,’ Reines goes so far as to argue ‘the ultimate right [emphasis added] of the individual to religious autonomy,’ thereby concretizing freedom as ‘the highest ideal possible to the modern religious community’ and creating an environment for ‘the creativity and experimentation necessary to meet the conditions of a radical and unknown future.’ ‘Deanthropomorphized and demythologized options of belief and observance’ must, he writes, be made widely available. The educational—and pastoral?—ideal of Judaism must abandon ‘endoctrining instruction in theistic absolutism and metaphenomenal providence to education in the soterial, ethical, and theological choices of an open religion.’ I believe that Reines’ proposal speaks as aptly to the diverse Christian ‘religious complex’ as it does to the Jewish.” [Gary Pence, “Constructing a Christian Polydoxy.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology. Volume 30, number 4, winter 2001. Pages 264-269.]

“Recently, “polydoxy” has been proposed as an alternative, or perhaps an antidote, to orthodoxy, embracing—rather than repressing—the multiplicity, open-endedness, and relationality of both the practice and the object of theology. Clearly, such a framing resonates strongly with the brief reflections on history and theology that I have offered here. However, where the discourse of orthodoxy tends to suppress its own inevitable, ongoing novelty, polydoxy—as proclaimed by the editors and contributors to the volume of the same name—may risk overstating its novelty, as if this were anything but inevitable.…

“We live in an era in which the forces of change and novelty, diversity and difference, are undeniable. This experience and the sensibility to which this gives rise is scarcely unprecedented, as any student of the late Roman empire, for example, is well aware; nor is it easily separable from the very forces of imperialism and globalization that seem so often intent on suppressing and flattening diversity and difference, then as now.”

[Virginia Burrus, “History, Theology, Orthodoxy, Polydoxy.” Modern Theology. Volume 30, number 3, July 2014. Pages 7-16.]

“… given the venerable pronouncements of the death of God, theology at the start of this millennium should be worse off than it is. The undeniable atrophy of those denominations that still support an educated clergy limit the resources for even discerning just which God it is that is presumed dead. The hard questions remain hard; the institutional fragilities remain unsparing. And so the buoyancy we see in theology right now is all the more remarkable. Its life and movement, which in this volume we are nicknaming ‘polydoxy,’ has multiple sources. Indeed, multiplicity itself has become theology’s resource. What had always seemed a liability for Christian theology – multiplicitous differences contending from within and competing from without – has miraculously turned into theology’s friend. Indeed an emergent commitment to the manifold of creation as it enfolds a multiplicity of wisdoms may be functioning as a baseline requirement for theological soundness. A responsible pluralism of interdependence and uncertainty now seems to facilitate deeper attention to ancient religious traditions as well as more robust engagement with serious critiques of religion. This is an approach that no longer needs to hide the internal fissures and complexities that riddle every Christian text or that wound and bless every theological legacy.” [Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, “Introduction.” Polydoxy: Theology of multiplicity and relation. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Pages 1-37.]

“As a name polydoxy has no position, no pulse or panache, without its difference from (and thus relation to) living avowals of orthodoxy—classical, retro-, neo- or radical. As a theological neologism, polydoxy tags a couple of millennia behind orthodoxy. But as content it is not only dependent upon orthodoxy but entangled with it. For it is positioned within a discursive field—a multiplicity—largely shaped and hosted by a mainline of western Christian theology.” [Catherine Keller, “Theology’s Multitude: Polydoxy Reviewed and Renewed.” Modern Theology. Volume 30, number 3, July 2014. Pages 127-139.]

“… which orthodoxy does polydoxy oppose, and which does it clarify? I hope that it opposes nominal orthodoxies whose specific content of ‘right’ results in the denial of constitutive multiplicity and the reification of status quo hierarchies of oppression and practices of torture. This is a fairly uncontroversial hope, or so I hope! I also hope that polydoxy clarifies orthodoxies whose content of ‘right’ is a ‘skillful means’ of love that leads to complex thriving of the world and all of its creatures and to liberation of the oppressed. Polydoxy’s opposition, I then conclude, is to orthodoxy that is neither right nor correct, and so not orthodox anyway. Polydoxy as an umbrella term is useful, I suggest, only so long as it clarifies the constitutive and responsive multiplicity of what we understand—for now—to be ‘right’ and ‘good’ and even ‘true’ and so giving content to ‘orthodoxy.’” [Laurel C. Schneider, “Getting it Right.” Modern Theology. Volume 30, number 3, July 2014. Pages 121-126.]

“Polydoxy [referring to the book, Polydoxy: Theology of multiplicity and relation] … operates in complex relation to orthodoxy. It would be tempting to reduce this relationship to one of simple opposition—to say, for example, that in the face of orthodoxy’s oneness, certainty, and autonomy, polydoxy unleashes manyness, uncertainty, and relation. But of course, these polydox values emerge from many of the sources (kataphatic, apophatic, and Trinitarian) that compose the orthodox tradition as such. So just as ‘multiplicity’ names not an opposition to oneness but rather a difference both beyond and within oneness, polydoxy claims not an opposition to orthodoxy but a complex ‘intra-activity’ with it. This intra-activity expresses itself in numerous ways. In some deployments, ‘polydoxy’ amounts to a kind of immanent critique of the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy—an exposition of the processes by which ‘rightness’ establishes itself by disavowing, punishing, ridiculing, and/or annihilating whatever differs from it. In this way, heterodoxy can be shown to be constitutive of orthodoxy as such, as its repressed other(s).” [Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Introducing Polydoxy.” Modern Theology. Volume 30, number 3, July 2014. Pages 1-6.]

“How do I receive the gift of Polydoxy: A Theology of Multiplicity and Relation? I will receive it, of course, in some way because simply by reading and absorbing the text, it will impact in some measure.…

“If I have laboured the Christological issues it is because I have yet to have a sense of the Christological model polydoxy is presenting and to highlight that not all Christological models are possible. So choices in the multiplicity have to be made. And if a certain orthodoxy is manifest in this choosing it is not because orthodoxy itself imposes such a model (orthodoxy, as I have emphasised is made and is continually being made as Christian faith seeks understanding), but because the models rejected cannot offer a logic for our salvation.”

[Graham Ward, “Receiving the Gift.” Modern Theology. Volume 30, number 3, July 2014. Pages 74-88.]

“The oneness of God in monotheism relieves us of the paradox of love that defies religions, and patriotisms, and identities, upon which wars and their empires depend. Love in a theology of multiplicity cannot turn away from the impossible inexchangeability of the world, cannot assume that missiles are lessons as if what is destroyed can be exchanged for what is gained. If God is love, God cannot be One, an ultimate unity in which the utter inexchangeability of a life for a nation is made not only exchangeable, but coherent. Love is a synonym, therefore, for incarnation just as both are a synonym for divine multiplicity. To follow a God who becomes flesh is to make room for more than One. It is a posture of openness to the world as it comes to us, of loving the discordant, plenipotential worlds more than the desire to overcome, to colonize, or even to ‘save’ them.

“Love, the only ethics imaginable in a theology of divine multiplicity, is a promise, not a threat. It is the presence/s of the divine, available for encounter if we leave the scripts aside, if we are prepared to have our hearts broken by beauty, awe, and the redemption of responsibility.

“Divine multiplicity, like any construct, is just a concept, metaphor. It is not divinity. ‘Divinity is, if nothing else, free. And this means that it is also free of theology and doctrine.’ The stories we tell of it, however, form the fabric of imagination about what is possible for us in this world that God so loves.

“Incarnation…again.”

[Laurel C. Schneider. Beyond Monotheism: A theology of multiplicity. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 251-252.]

“Radical activists asserted that the institutional order was centered upon monastics and the participation of laymen was limited, and that the institutional Buddhist order could not achieve independence from government intervention. For this reason, radical activists, including both monastics and laymen, focused instead on the propagation of the dharma [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, धर्म, dharma, ‘natural law’]. Even though the progressive group was divided, the emergency order administration brought together progressive opinions for reformation and gave birth to the six groups’ sangha [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, संघा, saṃghā, ‘community’] system, which proposed the addition of two groups of propagation lay priests, male and female, to the traditional four groups: monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen.…

“… the established monks were seriously worried about the loss of their positions if the progressive junior monks succeeded in gaining power. These senior monks had already seen the types of measure that could be implemented by the radical Buddhist monks during the time of the emergency order administration.”

[Chanju Mun, “A Historical Introduction to Minjung (Liberation) Buddhism: A South Korean Version of Radical Buddhism in the 1980s.” Politics, Religion & Ideology. Volume 15, number 2, June 2014. Pages 264-282.]

“This paper analyzes both the possibilities and problems of a ‘Buddhist materialism’ constructed along Marxian lines, by focusing in particular on Buddhist and Marxist conceptions of ‘liberation.’ ….

“The Marxian critique of contemplative knowledge, which aligns with [Richard] Rorty’s ‘constructivist’ preference for [Francis] Bacon over [René] Descartes, noted above, has rarely been revisited since [Karl] Marx’s time, but it seems to be another potentially fertile point of contact/contrast with traditional Buddhist thought—and one that has especial implications for a reconstructed Buddhist materialism. The emphasis on the ‘mind’ in early Buddhist thought … seem to suggest that Buddhism, too, may fall into a into the contemplative or transcendental trap.”

[James Mark Shields, “Liberation as Revolutionary Praxis: Rethinking Buddhist Materialism.” Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Volume 20, 2013. Pages 461-499.]

“… we should note that, in addition to traditional Buddhist scepticism towards socialist ‘materialism’ and ‘individualism,’ another factor that hampers the development of Buddhist socialism in any context is the residual anti-religious aspect of Marxist versions of socialism (this has also been an issue with experiments in Christian socialism and liberation theology).” [James Mark Shields, “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan.” Politics, Religion & Ideology. Volume 15, number 2, June 2014. Pages 205-223.]

“… just as socialism can wake Buddhists up from their dogmatic slumbers, Buddhism serves to ‘soften’ the harder edges of mainstream socialist atheism and materialism—in short, Buddhism gives a humanist element that socialism sometimes, perhaps inevitably, seems to lack.” [James Mark Shields, “A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution: The Radical Buddhism of Senoꞌo Girō (1889–1961).” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Volume 39, number 2, 2012. Pages 333-351.]

“Choice architecture simply posits that the manner in which options are presented will have a guiding influence over future outcomes. For example, foods put out at eye level in shopping centers are more likely to be selected than those at ankle level, unless you’re a toddler. In other words, we never enter a choice environment without a gentle or firm hand at our back.… [W]e feel it is necessary for people and organizations to understand how to design choice options that retain freedom but that gently guide their decisions towards greater health and happiness.

“Ultimately choice does not occur in a vacuum. Small strategically placed nudges can make a huge difference.

“So let’s talk about nudges. If we acknowledge that design implies a guiding bias, a nudge, then, is a simplified way of describing the mechanism within the choice architecture that moves decisions toward a specific outcome. Nudges in and of themselves are value-neutral, but we’re interested in nudges that facilitate positive outcomes and enlightened behavior, designed by the deciders themselves.

“The Playbook [The Buddha’s Playbook: Strategies for Enlightened Living] is designed to give you the tools to become your own choice architect and nudge designer. We want to bring the principles of choice architecture from the background of your unconscious mind to the foreground of your conscious awareness so that you can successfully implement your own nudge strategies—both internally and externally—to realize your own goals.”

[Michael Brooks and Joshua Summers. The Buddha’s Playbook: Strategies for Enlightened Living. Boston, Massachusetts: Sati Solutions. 2009. Pages 20-22.]

“At the heart of many experiences in social life lies a social dilemma—a fundamental conflict between the short-term interests of individuals and the longer-term interests of the groups of which they are a part.…

“The ubiquitous nature of social dilemmas, and their centrality to social life, has prompted a great deal of research in the experimental social sciences. After decades of steady incremental advances in our understanding of the ‘main effects’ in social dilemmas (e.g., communication, uncertainty, group size), researchers have begun to study the interactions and complex contingencies that must be better specified to achieve a more complete understanding of social dilemma dynamics.”

[J. Mark Weber and David M. Messick, “Conflicting Interests in Social Life: Understanding Social Dilemma Dynamics.” The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture. Michele J. Gefland and Jeanne M. Brett, editors. Stanford, California: Stanford Business Books imprint of Stanford University Press. 2004. Page 374-394.]

“The six types of capitalist state can be placed on a continuum ranking their relative susceptibility to radical change. From most vulnerability to internal radical movements to least vulnerability the types are in order: (1) the class warfare state; (2) the transitional state; (3) the partisan state; (4) the liberal state; (5) the authoritarian state; and (6) the totalitarian state. Most of these six have distinctive subtypes which share the main features of the generic types, but differ in detail in terms of the relative balance of their internal relations. For example, the laissez faire liberal state can be distinguished from the interventionist liberal welfare state.” [Edward S. Malecki, “The Capitalist State: Structural Variation and Its Implications for Radical Change.” Western Political Quarterly. Volume 34, number 2, June 1981. Pages 246-269.]

“While [Karl] Marx was unenthusiastic about the prospects for worker ownership in contemporary capitalist economies, he nevertheless did appreciate that there is a dual and contradictory relationship between ownership and control. Modern readers are most familiar, of course, with his discussions of how ownership confers power or control: it is the capitalist’s ownership of the means of production that allows him to control the labor that works for him; the workers will-later seize ownership of the means of production in order to assert their own control over them. Less prominent, but clearly present throughout Marx’s work, is the theme that the capitalist’s ownership does not give him freedom but instead makes him a slave to his own possessions.” [Raymond Russell, “Using Ownership to Control: Making Workers Owners in the Contemporary United States.” Politics & Society. Volume 13, number 3, September 1984. Pages 253-294.]

“In the growing debate and literature about the contributions of tourism to peace, a particular aspect that has so far been largely ignored is ‘peace tourism.’ This involves visits to places, at home and abroad, which are significant because of their association with such notions as peace-making, peaceful conflict resolution, prevention of war, resistance to war, protesting war, nonviolence and reconciliation. These associations can refer to the past as well as present, and to national as well as international contexts. This chapter identifies and discusses several aspects of peace tourism.

“In the first place, a growing number of cities can be regarded, or regard themselves, as cities of peace. A variety of peace cities – which constitute an obvious destination for the peace tourist – will be introduced. Secondly, museums play an important role in the national and global tourism industry. In the second half of the twentieth century, a new type of museum came to thefore – the peace museum.”

[Peter van den Dungen, “Peace Tourism.” International Handbook on Tourism and Peace. Cordula Wohlmuther and Werner Wintersteiner, editors. Klagenfurt, Austria: Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education of the Klagenfurt University. 2013. Pages 62-77.]

“Ontology has been characterized as the study of the most general kinds that exist in the universe. Usually the emphasis has been on demarcation: which candidates for existence really do exist. Aristotle and Plato disagreed in their answers, and philosophers have gone on disagreeing ever since. In the chapters that follow I express very little interest in those disputes. As I say …, I think of myself as a ‘dynamic nominalist,’ interested in how our practices of naming interact with the things that we name—but I could equally be called a dialectical realist, preoccupied by the interactions between what there is (and what comes into being) and our conceptions of it.

“Yet some of the old connotations of ‘ontology’ serve me well, for I want to talk about objects in general. Not just things, but whatever we individuate and allow ourselves to talk about. That includes not only ‘material’ objects but also classes, kinds of people, and, indeed, ideas. Finally, if we are concerned with the coming into being of the very possibility of some objects, what is that if not historical?”

[Ian Hacking. Historical Ontology. London: Harper University Press. 2002. Page 2.]

“It [making up people] is about the interactions between people and how they are classified, how people may, by a sort of feedback effect, change because of how they are classified, and change the very sense or boundaries of the original classifications. If, ‘for want of a better word,’ we speak of concepts here, I am not concerned abstractly with the concepts but concretely with the dynamics of interaction involving concepts, institutions, individuals, moral sensibility and the like. This dynamic nominalism (which is also a dialectical realism) may be all wrong, but by golly it does not seem to me to be anodyne. I suspect that this philosophy was what the anonymous reader had in mind. That reader may also have seen (as is announced at the start of the book) that much of the book is a case-history of dynamic nominalism and making up people.” [Ian Hacking, “Indeterminacy in the past: on the recent discussion of chapter 17 of Rewriting the Soul.” History of the Human Sciences. Volume 16, number 2, May 2003. Pages 117-124.]

“The nominalist controversy need not detain us. There is enough in common between nominalists and their opponents for the two sides to admit the phenomena Ishall present. The attitude to the phenomena will be different, and the background talk about the phenomena will be different, but not enough for us to pause. For example, the nominalist says that the structure of the facts in my world is an imposition upon the world. The world does not come tidily sorted into facts. People constitute facts in a social process of interaction with the world and intervening in its affairs. Importantly, says the nominalist, forms of knowledge are created in a microsociological process. The person who believes the universe has a unique inherent structure will be offended by this description, but if attracted at all by the notion of forms of knowledge, may make use of an alternative background tale. It is this. The world is far too rich in facts for any one organization of ideas to trick it out uniquely in the facts. We select which facts interest us, and a form of scientific knowledge is a selector of questions to be answered by obtaining the facts. A rival, and if possible nonequivalent, form will elicit different facts. The facts are not constructed, although the forms of selection are. In what follows, it does not matter which variant of these two extremes you find most attractive.” [Ian Hacking. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999. Page 174.]

“To conceptualize coproduction involving scientific knowledge that affects human beings’ opportunities for self formation, I adopt Hacking’s … perspective of ‘dynamic nominalism.’ According to this position, new kinds of people such as ‘gay youth’ are not merely discovered by experts, but rather, such human kinds come into being at the same time that human classifications are invented through a process of ‘making up people’ …. Dynamic nominalism further posits that there can be interactive relationships between human classifications and those classified …. As such, the process of making up people can foster ‘looping effects,’ whereby people come to learn how they have been classified, modify their behavior, and create a new reality that can then be described differently by experts …. Unlike some strains of nominalism, Hacking’s position is not antirealist (it is alternately called ‘dialectical realism;’ …). However, interactive relationships always exist between representations of human reality and people who can learn how they have been represented. Even if a human kind is ‘indifferent’ to human action, as in the case of some conditions that we may understand as being rooted in biology, there is still a sense in which it is ‘interactive’ as people experience new discourses and institutions organized around a classification and react to being classified ….” [Tom Waidzunas, “Young, Gay, and Suicidal: Dynamic Nominalism and the Process of Defining a Social Problem with Statistics.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. Volume 37, number 2, March 2012. Pages 199-225.]

“I discovered much later that at about the same time Michel Foucault spoke of historical nominalism. He was reviewing a famous book about homosexuality (a very well-known book), he says it’s a great book, etc. but that all those people who think that there is such a thing as homosexuality, as opposed to same-sex behaviour, really need to undertake a serious historical nominalism. I spoke of dynamic nominalism, but I could have said ‘historical,’ except I insist on the dynamics, the way in which the naming interacts with what is named. A friend did suggest to me that you could just as well call it dialectical realism as opposed to dynamic nominalism. I said that was OK too.” [Ole Jacob Madsen, Johannes Servan, and Simen Andersen Øyen, “‘I am a philosopher of the particular case’: An interview with the 2009 Holberg prizewinner Ian Hacking.” History of the Human Sciences. Volume 26, number 3, July 2013. Pages 32-51.]

“This book is an attempt to describe the form computing will take in the next few years. Specifically, it’s about a vision of processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear. It’s about the enormous consequences this disappearance has for the kinds of tasks computers are applied to, for the way we use them, and for what we understand them to be.

“Although aspects of this vision have been called a variety of names—ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, physical computing, tangible media, and so on—I think of them as facets of one coherent paradigm of interaction that I call everyware.

“In everyware, all the information we now look to our phones or Web browsers to provide becomes accessible from just about anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner appropriate to our location and context.

“In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life—things as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceries—are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment.

“In all of these scenarios, there are powerful informatics underlying the apparent simplicity of the experience, but they never breach the surface of awareness: things Just Work. Interactions with everyware feel natural, spontaneous, human. Ordinary people finally get to benefit from the full power of information technology, without having to absorb the esoteric bodies of knowledge on which it depends. And the sensation of use—even while managing an unceasing and torrential flow of data—is one of calm, of relaxed mastery.

“This, anyway, is the promise.”

[Adam Greenfield. Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Berkeley, California: New Riders imprint Peachpit, a division of Pearson Education. 2006. Pages 1-2.]

“The title of this article expands on Adam Greenfield’s … concept of “everyware” as a way to describe and theorize ubiquitous, barely detectable technologies operating within and across spaces. Greenfield’s conceptual play on the word ‘everywhere’ encapsulates how, increasingly, ubiquitous technology infiltrates everyday spaces. These technologies ‘comprise any number of mobile, wearable, distributed and context-aware computing applications’ …. Everyware is always on, always gathering data, and is fast becoming a function of the everyday spaces we traverse.…

“This article focuses on one sub-variant of everyware—wearable technology, and specifically fitness technology—by developing the word ‘everywear’ to deepen and enrich one key area of Greenfield’s analytical concept. Using the term ‘everywear’ permits this article to remain beneath the proverbial umbrella Greenfield’s work encompasses, while trying to more deeply account for the dynamics of wearable fitness technologies.”

[James N. Gilmore, “Everywear: The quantified self and wearable fitness technologies.” New Media & Society. Volume 18, number 11, December 2016. Pages 2524-2539.]

“… the ontology of consumption, understood by Marx as the relationship between capitalists as sellers and workers as possessors of exchange-value in the form of wages, is immediately regarded as an uneven and contradictory relationship. Workers are, in the context of their employment by any one capitalist, primarily considered possessors of labour-power making them a cost of production, and yet at the same time understood to be consumers whose ability to spend money on commodities derives from the wages they are paid.… Those on limited incomes do not tend to spend a lot, and their thrift and prudence is indeed considered a normative issue: although ‘consumption by he rich has been condoned as a means of creating a prosperous economy,’ the working poor ‘have often been encouraged to defer consumption as a moral duty’ ….” [Niamh Mulcahy, “Workers-as-consumers: Rethinking the political economy of use-value and the reproduction of capital.” Capital & Class. OnlineFirst edition. November, 2016. Pages 1-18.]

“My own politics—well, I don’t spend too much time thinking about them, because I’m too busy thinking about the early twentieth century, you know, so I just characterize my views as vaguely left. Which I think is OK, because that means I’m sort of automatically not partisan, and I think that’s good for everybody. It’s good for me as I also want to keep one foot in the academic community and one foot in the activist community. What connects me to the academic community is that I am really interested in the Bolsheviks as part of Russian history, which is not the main focus of the activists. But the activists have got me interested in the larger question of the communist movement, the relation to Marxism, so I’ve had to broaden myself considerably. In particular, I’ve had to learn a lot about European social democracy, European socialism, and the Second International.” [Lars T. Lih, “On Marxism and Melodrama: An Interview With Lars Lih.” The North Star. October, 2013. Online publication. No pagination.]

“I am not a member of any left organisation ….

“… If the standard story is correct, and [Vladimir] Lenin really did have the conscious intention of using the Prague Conference to make the Bolshevik faction equivalent to the party as a whole, then he thoroughly deserves the severe condemnation he received from his political foes at the time and from such informed anti-Lenin historians as Carter Elwood. Any such secret intention on his part meant that the process of calling the conference was deeply dishonest and calculated in a disloyal way to wreak as much damage as possible on the parent organisation.”

[Lars T. Lih, “Falling out over a Cliff.” Weekly Worker. Issue 901, February 2012. Online publication. No pagination.]

“… in November 1904, the Mensheviks carried out their promise to come up with a new, truly Social-Democratic, political tactic. They proposed a campaign to stiffen the anti-government opposition of elite groups such as the zemstvos (local bodies with mild self-governing powers). The Menshevik plan may have saved Lenin from terminal obsession with his own intra-party grievances. In any event, his blistering attack on the Menshevik plan opened up a new chapter in Menshevik-Bolshevik relations in which the sides argued about the actual balance of class forces in Russia and the crucial political choices facing revolutionary Social Democracy. Unfortunately, we must take our leave of the Menshevik-Bolshevik debate just as it enters this more instructive and substantive phase.…

“Looking back a few years later, the Bolshevik M. Liadov defined the heart of Bolshevism in 1904 as the defence of partiinost [Russian Cyrillic, партийность, partijnostʹ, ‘partisanship’], a word that in this era can be defined as ‘acting as befits a modern political party.’ A historian of French socialism calls Jules Guesde’s Marxist party ‘the first modern political party’ in France because it had the following characteristics: ‘a large national base, an annual national congress, an executive committee, a programme, and an insistence on discipline.’ This also defines what the Bolsheviks meant by partiinost.”

[Lars T. Lih. Lenin Rediscovered: What is to Be Done? In Context. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. 2005. Page 499.]

“I … believe that much of the dispute between myself and writers in the activist-tradition is unnecessary. For various accidental reasons, these writers have ended up committed to historical myths that stem originally from academic historians of a very different political outlook. These myths can be jettisoned without any damage to the political values of the activist-tradition. The irony is that these myths that are defended with such fervour by pro-[Vladimir] Lenin writers end up by tarnishing Lenin’s image. If Lenin shuttled back and forth between one ideological extreme and another, if he established a faction whose original hallmark was suspicion of workers in the Party, if he had a lifelong admiration for the writings of a passive, mechanical fatalist – then Lenin is just that harder to admire. The activist-tradition has some great strengths in its approach to Lenin, and it will only become stronger by rethinking these superfluous positions.” [Lars T. Lih, “Lenin Disputed.” Historical Materialism. Volume 18, number 3, September 2010. Pages 108-174.]

“Bolshevism, as a distinct current in Russian Social Democracy, arose in the years 1904–14. During those years Bolshevism was a Russian answer to Russian problems. Later, when Bolshevism acquired a wider meaning, Lenin coined the term ‘Old Bolshevism’ as a label for the earlier period. ‘Old Bolshevism’ is a useful term that we will employ in later chapters. But for now Old Bolshevism is the only Bolshevism there is, so we shall dispense with the qualifying adjective.

“In [Vladimir] Lenin’s banner sentence of 1894 the crucial central episode of the heroic scenario is described in the following words: ‘the Russian worker, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism’. These few words contain the essence of Bolshevism during its first decade, and we shall spend this chapter unpacking their meaning. We must first ask: what is the role of this episode in the overall heroic scenario? The answer: to open up the road to socialist revolution by removing the obstacle of tsarist absolutism. The more thoroughly the revolution did its job, the swifter would be the journey to the final goal. Therefore, the party’s goal should be revolution ‘to the end’ …, that is, ‘to the absolute destruction of monarchical despotism’ and its replacement by a democratic republic.”

[Lars T. Lih. Lenin. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 2011. Pages 84-85.]

“Digital cultures are performative cultures. This assumption is illustrated by the ubiquitous and invisible infrastructures that constitute them, which are interstratified by so-called ‘smart things’ …, creating a socio-technical environment, in which performances of the technological come about. While human users may not be able to comprehend the entire technological performance, they are without a doubt intertwined with it. The digital performs, the human reacts to the agency the technologies suggest, and vice versa: ‘Performing (the) Digital.’

“There is a considerable genealogical background to this assumption, which needs to be reconstructed. It is founded within a ‘discourse history of performativity,’ which has been taking place across scientific disciplines concerning technology and the humanities since the 1950s. It is through this history that the reciprocity of performance between humans and technology was established. As a result, technical things and computational operations could be understood as performative, while at the same time relieving human agency from mere intentional and representational action.

“The expanded definition of performativity allows consideration of a ‘dispositif of the performative within digital cultures,’ which corresponds to the scenario above. This dispositif is constituted by an ensoulment of technical things up to the point of having agency that is not entirely relatable or controllable by humans. The result is a ‘technological wonderland’ that functions autonomously and (mostly) without friction in the metaphorical backrooms of society, thereby fascinating its inhabitants and inviting them to linger and loiter …. Simultaneously, this dispositif does not conceal its precarity: it is constantly at risk of technological failure and the revelation of its ensoulment and magic as pure illusion. This ambivalent relationship between control and loss of control does not, however, reduce its fascinating power of seduction; on the contrary, the ambivalent game only increases its appeal. Performativity therefore implies not a simple expression of action, but a complex amalgam of a performance and production (mis-en-scène [stage placement]) history of unrestricted, ensouled technologies.”

[Martina Leeker, “Performing (the) digital: Positions of critique in digital cultures.” Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures. Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, and Timon Beyes, editors. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag. 2017. Creative Commons. Pages 21-59.]

“A political, performative and affective landscape is revealed in this chapter as a way of approaching the topic of performing the digital: from the macro of the upheaval caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass data surveillance to the micro of a phenomenological account of a crisis following an artistic performance using mobile media. ‘Performing Encryption’ is a response to working as a dancer and philosopher with mobile networked digital media that can be read as a part of a larger narrative of transitioning from one state to another.” [Susan Kozel, “Performing encryption.” Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures. Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, and Timon Beyes, editors. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag. 2017. Creative Commons. Pages 117-134.]

“The act of walking the city lies at the heart of the project ‘Mapping Invisibility.’ Walking functions both as method and content, both in terms of the workshop where participants walk the city collectively with a guide, and in terms of the audio tour where the participant walks the city individually.…

“Using strategies and technologies of digital mapping, tracing and tracking the project aimed at bringing undocumented and documented citizens together by making the everyday practice of walking in the city as an undocumented citizen visible and perceptible. Considering the particular use of surveillance tools and strategies, I propose to understand this project as an example of so-called ‘surveillance art.’”

[Sigrid Merx, “Mapping invisibility: Surveillance art and the potential of performative cartography.” Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures. Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, and Timon Beyes, editors. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag. 2017. Creative Commons. Pages 157-167.]

“To reconstruct a critical sociology on the basis of the sociology of critique by hybridizing it with the old thematic of capitalism: such was our ambition. So what analytical objects did we select to pursue this project? Starting out from the question posed by the lack of social critique that seemed to us to be characteristic of the 1980s and the begin,ning of the 1990s, we developed a dual analysis. In the first instance, we analysed the role of critique in the changes in historical capitalism, basing this work on a more general model of normative change whose construction was one of the main theoretical objectives of our work Second, we sought to deepen … the role played by the coexistence of comparatively incompatible forms of critique in the dynamic relationship between capitalism and critique.” [Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Gregory Elliott, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2007. Page xiii.]

“We shall … have to demonstrate how the new spirit of capitalism arises on hitherto unused principles of equivalence. We shall also have to indicate the process of cultural assimilation of themes and constructs already present in the ideological environment, deriving in particular from the critical discourses addressed to capitalism, through which this spirit was structured and progressively became more fumly entrenched, to the point of forming a novel ideological configuration.” [Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Gregory Elliott, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2007. Page 24.]

“When the original French edition of The New Spirit of Capitalism was published in 1999 it immediately established a reputation as a centrally important contribution to recent anti-capitalist literature. For this reason alone, both Verso [imprint of New Left Books] and Gregory Elliott, its translator, are to be congratulated for producing such a fine edition in English.” [Paul Blackledge,“The New Spirit of Capitalism.” Review article. Capital & Class. Volume 31, number 2, summer 2007. Pages 198-201.]

“… however, critical theories of domination are not abstract organums suspended in the heaven of metaphysics. The existence of a concrete relationship with a set of people (defined as public, class, group, sex or whatever) forms part of their self-definition. Unlike ‘traditional theory,’ ‘critical theory’ possesses the objective of reflexivity. It can or even must … grasp the discontents of actors, explicitly consider them in the very labour of theorization, in such a way as to alter their relationship to social reality and, thereby, that social reality itself, in the direction of emancipation. As a consequence, the kind of critique they make possible must enable the disclosure of aspects of reality in an immediate relationship with the preoccupations of actors – that is, also with ordinary critiques.” [Luc Boltanski. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Gregory Elliott, translator. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2011. Pages 4-5.]

“In the case of theories of domination, the exteriority on which critique is based can be called complex, in the sense that it is established at two different levels. It must first of all be based on an exteriority of the first kind to equip itself with the requisite data to create the picture of the social order that will be submitted to critique. A metacritical theory is in fact necessarily reliant on a descriptive sociology or anthropology. But to be critical, such a theory also needs to furnish itself, in ways that can be explicit to very different degrees, with the means of passing a judgement on the value of the social order being described.” [Luc Boltanski. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Gregory Elliott, translator. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2011. Page 8.]

“The present investigation examines the hypothesis that contemporary pop music has caught ‘retromania’: infected by its own past, it will bring about its own downfall. It identifies this observation as retrology: a specific school of thought within pop history.…

“… [The] pop crisis … [of] retrology … [is] a negative self-description that centres around the inflation of past references.…

“… Retrologists’ worst fear is that the day is not far off when pop will forever cease to exist.”

[Markus Heidingsfelder, “Retrology: Addicted to the Future.” Society and Culture in South Asia. Volume 2, number 2, 2016. Pages 182-203.]

“This chapter examines journalism that is produced not by professionals but by those outside mainstream media organizations. Amateur media producers typically have little or no training or professional qualifications as journalists; they write and report from their position as citizens, as members of communities, as activists, as fans.…

“… The medium itself requires transformation: the position of the work in relation to the means of production has to be critically re-aligned. This requires not only the radicalising of methods of production but a re-thinking of what it means to be a media producer.…

“There is a … value in adopting the term ‘alternative journalism.’ No longer are we limited to thinking about amateur journalism solely as political projects, whose priorities are radical forms of organising, social movements, and individual or collective consciousness-raising. My own work has sought to explore the implications of what is both an expanded concept of amateur media and, at the same time, a more focused one: that of amateur journalism. Whilst not wishing to lose sight of any particular social relations that may be developed through amateur media production, I argue that any model of alternative media should consider equally processes and products ….”

[Chris Atton, “Alternative and Citizen Journalism.” The Handbook of Journalism Studies. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 265-278.]

“An ontology of the present is a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings. He tries to understand their peculiar habits: for example, their philosophers are obsessed by numerology and the being of the one and the two, while their novelists write complex narratives about the impossibility of narrating anything; their politicians meanwhile, all drawn from the wealthiest classes, publicly debate the problem of making more money by reducing the spending of the poor.…

“Any ontology of the present needs to be an ideological analysis as well as a phenomenological description; and as an approach to the cultural logic of a mode of production, or even of one of its stages—such as our moment of postmodernity, late capitalism, globalization, is—it needs to be historical as well (and historically and economically comparatist).”

[Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Left Review. Series II, number 92, March–April 2015. Pages 101-132.]

“I have … implied that our relationship to our own past as Americans must necessarily be very different and far more problematical than for Europeans whose national histories (the still vital myth of the Great Revolution or the Paris Commune in France, say, or the burning significance in the present of a historical moment such as ‘the making of the English working class’) remain alive within contemporary political and ideological struggles. I think a case could be made for the peculiar disappearance of the American past in general, which comes before us in unreal costumes and by way of the spurious images of nostalgia art, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt is as dead and unreal as George Washington or Cotton Mather. This has something to do with the triumphant and systematic way in which the American past, and most particularly its great radical traditions, have been stamped out in almost every generation: the 1930s was only the latest great period of militancy to have been obliterated from any living collective consciousness (with the result that the militants of the 1960s were effectively denied any sense of a still vital radical tradition).” [Fredric Jameson. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ian Buchanan, editor. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2007. Page 4.]

“Jameson on Jameson collects a series of interviews with this productive and provocative cultural critic and historical materialist. The contexts of these interviews are quite diverse, spanning three decades (the earliest was first published in 1982) and engaging with scholars representing many political and cultural commitments worldwide. Most have been published before, but not necessarily in English or in the English-speaking world.” [Daniel Gustav Anderson, “Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism.” Review article. Rocky Mountain Review. Volume 63, number 2, fall 2009. Pages 283-285.]

“Embodied cognition is the result of interplay between sensory stimuli of the body and the emotions and feelings of an individual. [Walt] Whitman describes the bodily perceptions he encounters externally as ‘moisture’ and ‘silence.’ They include implicitly the personal antecedent in the lecture hall and features of the environment, such as the solitude and darkness. Emotions are involved from the outset and are basic. Thus inside and outside are intermingled. Embodied cognition envisages the whole situation of the individual and all senses, so it cannot be reduced to the detection of stellar photons. At the very beginning of participatory perception, primitive reactions of attraction and avoidance may occur as observed already in single-celled organisms …. They eventually become more processed primary emotions such as surprise, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, or sadness. Sophisticated feelings and values, such as art and religion, form at a higher level, but are present in primitive form from the beginning of the cognitive process.” [Arnold O. Benz, “Astrophysics and Creation: Perceiving the Universe through Science and Participation.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Volume 52, number 1, March 2017. Pages 186-195.]

“A poetic naturalist will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. The difference is that an eliminativist will say ‘and therefore they are just illusions,’ while the poetic naturalist says ‘but they are no less real for all of that.’

“Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars coined the term manifest image to refer to the folk ontology suggested by our everyday experience, and scientific image for the new, unified view of the world established by science. The manifest image and the scientific image use different concepts and vocabularies, but ultimately they should fit together as compatible ways of talking about the world. Poetic naturalism accepts the usefulness of each way of talking in its appropriate circumstances, and works to show how they can be reconciled with one another.

“Within poetic naturalism we can distinguish among three different kinds of stories we can tell about the world. There is the deepest, most fundamental description we can imagine—the whole universe, exactly described in every microscopic detail. Modern science doesn’t know what that description actually is right now, but we presume that there at least is such an underlying reality. Then there are ‘emergent’ or ‘effective’ descriptions, valid within some limited domain. That’s where we talk about ships and people, macroscopic collections of stuff that we group into individual entities as part of this higher-level vocabulary. Finally, there are values: concepts of right and wrong, purpose and duty, or beauty and ugliness. Unlike higher-level scientific descriptions, these are not determined by the scientific goal of fitting the data. We have other goals: we want to be good people, get along with others, and find meaning in our lives. Figuring out the best way to talk about the world is an important part of working toward those goals.

“Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.”

[Sean Carroll. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. New York: Dutton imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. 2016. Pages 21-22.]

“[Sean] Carroll’s own view … [is] ‘poetic naturalism’ …. The ‘naturalism’ part refers to his insistence that ‘there is only one unified, physical world’: the ‘poetic’ part allows that there are ‘many useful ways of talking about it.’ Thus on his view there is only one fundamental underlying physical reality (though, he adds, we have no idea what this is yet!). However, there are two broad categories for constructing descriptions of that reality. First are the sciences: physics, biology, psychology. The subject matters of these sciences are real, factual, and objective, but they are not fundamental. They count as ‘emergent realities.’ Finally, there is the realm of values, purposes, and meanings. These entities Carroll describes as real and emergent, yet as constructed and subjective. So what we have is a tripartite continuum of realities: the fundamental level, the emergent objective level, and the emergent subjective level. (However, whereas most philosophers would use the terms ‘levels,’ Carroll mostly describes these categories as ‘ways of talking’ or ‘ways of thinking’ about reality, though it is not entirely clear why he prefers this subjectivist vocabulary.)” [Whitley Kaufman, “Poetic Naturalism: Sean Carroll, Science, and Moral Objectivity.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Volume 52, number 1, March 2017. Pages 196-211.]

“I … suggest also that we should rethink this distinction [between productive and unproductive labour], such that it becomes a category of struggle, rather than a classificatory basis from which we analysis capital’s ‘laws of motion.’ That is, we should start from the struggle between capital and labour — from human activity itself — and from this emerges the productive-unproductive labour distinction. Thus the distinction thus becomes an open category and inherent to the concept of value, not one of its ‘building blocks.’ …

“… I suggest that much human activity remains (or becomes) unproductive of value for capital and that the productive-unproductive labour distinction should be understood as contingent upon class struggle, that is, as an open category. I suggest that this understanding retains the fundamental relation between the distinction and the labour theory of value, but contra most Classical Marxists, as an internal relation. The law of value is then nothing other than capital’s, which humanity struggles to undermine and transcend.”

[David Harvie, “All Labour Produces Value For Capital And We All Struggle Against Value.” The Commoner: A Web Journal for Other Values. Number 10, spring/summer 2005. Pages 132-171.]

“One of the most distinctive aspects of workerist historiography in the seventies was to be its reconsideration of revolutionary unionism. The cavalier dismissal of syndicalism during the preceding decade was now commonly replaced by an appreciation of that ‘patient daily’ mass work … practiced by the less demagogic of Italy’s own revolutionary syndicalists during the early years of the twentieth century …. So too that of the Catalonian movement before the Second World War, which offered many parallels, in the opinion of Roberto Bordiga …, to the modern Italian situation. In both the textile and building industries, which were then central to Barcelona’s economy [in Spain], unskilled migrants had possessed a determinate weight, just as they did in the industrial triangle of the sixties.” [Steve Wright, “The Historiography of the Mass Worker.” The Commoner: A Web Journal for Other Values. Number 5, autumn 2002. Pages 1-16.]

“To discuss Marxism in the early twenty-first century may well seem strangely beside the point. After all, since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, one self-proclaimed Marxist regime after the other has been forced to consign itself to oblivion. And the officially Marxist political parties that for a long time were a serious force in Western European politics have either disappeared or have become marginal. However, Marxism as an intellectual perspective still provides a useful counterbalance to our propensity to see ourselves and the writers that we read as completely divorced from socio-economic circumstances. It also counterbalances the related tendency to read the books and poems we read as originating in an autonomous mental realm, as the free products of free and independent minds.

“Marxism’s questioning of that freedom is now a good less sensational than it was in the 1840s and 1850s when Karl Marx (1818–83) began to outline what is now called Marxist philosophy, although it is still controversial enough.”

[Hans Bertens. Literary Theory: The Basics. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 62-63.]

“… such a model theorizes the continued way in which various forms of materiality, not just bodily, but geopolitical and political-economic, underpin and exist in contradiction tradiction with the symbolic codings through which we apprehend them in late capitalism, despite all the emphasis on the postindustrial or symbolic nature of contemporary capitalism.

“This, then, is the model that I want to propose as a leftist ontology of the present. It is an ontology that attempts to attend to all of the powerful epistemological questions raised by poststructuralist theory, while at the same time insisting on the twin forms of materialism asserted by psycho-analysis analysis and Marxism. It recognizes that we only apprehend the material dimensions of life through the medium of language, yet it also marks the way in which the material underpins, shapes, and transforms the domains of language as well as fantasy and desire.”

[Christopher Breu, “Signification and Substance: Toward a Leftist Ontology of the Present.” A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics. Carsten Strathausen, editor. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. Kindle edition.]

“The far left can be … divided on the basis of its ideological and policy preferences into four major subgroups …:

[Luke March. Contemporary Far Left Parties in Europe: From Marxism to the Mainstream? Berlin, Germany: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. November, 2008. Pages 3-4.]

“Incidentalism is not a style of art, but rather an attitude towards the practice of art. Incidentalists are artists of any style, practice or medium who apply incidentalism in their work.…

“The artist is a worker of boundries. To articulate is to express by manipulating boundries, boundries in sounds and shapes, boundaries in beliefs and behaviour. Whether for a page, canvas, stage or a moment of pregnant silence, it is the task of the artist to express that which has never been. It is through this articulation, this boundary work, that new ideas, new knowledge and new techniques first emerge.

“WHEREAS, it is the artist who is the bringer of the new, SO THEREFORE incidentalism is a strategy for provoking new expressions.…

“The new cannot be achieved with skill or knowledge, both of which are rooted in the past, and are artifacts of the old. You cannot find the new by way of that which you have already conceived. If the outcome of an incident can be imagined, any enlightenment has already been perceived in the imagining; only the un-planned can reveal the unpreconcieved. Incidentalism seeks to introduce uncontrollable or unpredictable factors into the incident of art.

“WHEREAS incidentalism strives to express the new, SO THEREFORE it is not our purpose to use art as a tool to demonstrate our own skill or knowledge, but rather to use art as an apparatus to incite expressions that are beyond our own preconceptions.”

[Dmytri Kleiner, “Incidentalist Manifestos Draft 11, Idiosyntactix circa 1998 // #platpol11.” May 12th, 2011. Retrieved on February 9th, 2017. Web. No pagination.]

“Both [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s and [Karl] Marx’s discourse has been misread and has been either assimilated into the prevalent law or imposed on it. Hegel anticipated this, but Marx, who made the relation of theory and practice so central, misunderstood the relation of his discourse and the possibility of a transformed politics.…

“This critique of Marxism itself yields the project of a critical Marxism.…

“To expound capitalism as a culture is thus not to abandon the classical Marxist interests in political economy and in revolutionary practice. On the contrary, a presentation of the contradictory relations between Capital and culture is the only way to link the analysis of the economy to comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice.”

[Gillian Rose. Hegel: Contra Sociology. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: The Athlone Press. 1995. Pages 219-220.]

“This article is intended as a contribution towards the retrieval of [Gillian] Rose’s original project of a Critical Marxism for contemporary social and political theory.… This project is to take the form of linking ‘the presentation of the contradictory relations between Capital and culture’ to ‘the analysis of the economy’ and thereby ‘comprehend the conditions of a revolutionary practice.’ It must be conceded that Rose’s Marxist phraseology appears dated today. But the power and promise of Rose’s early thought lie precisely in its capacity to comprehend the way in which Marxism has been rendered anachronistic, from a standpoint that does not admit of its historical redundancy.… To demonstrate that Rose’s thought is relevant to our age, we must, first, establish – since this is far from self-evident from the texts – that there is a coherent Critical Marxist project contained in her first two works; and, second, we must detail how and why she abandoned it.” [Tony Gorman, “Gillian Rose and the project of a Critical Marxism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 105, January/February 2001. Pages 25-36.]

“In this paper I discuss what [Theodor] Adorno means by ‘critical theory’ and the sorts of claims he makes for critical theory in relation to other sociologies. I ask firstly, what does the term concept mean and what does the term ‘object’ mean? Secondly, how are concepts formed in the cognition of society? Thirdly, in what sense are they theoretical and critical? My aim is to assess whether critical theory is coherent and whether it provides a sociological perspective and methodology sui generis.” [Gillian Rose, “How is Critical Theory Possible?: Theodor W Adorno and Concept Formation in Sociology.” Political Studies. Volume XXIV, number 1, April 1976. Pages 69-85.]

“… visual pleasure never ends, and has its own contradictions. Theorists of the visual argue that there is a specific logic of the gaze and that visual pleasure is deeply bound into the regulatory fictions of heterosexuality. The next section addresses this pleasure and its repressions, and suggests that the retreat to a critical distance is no escape at all. Geographers are pursued by their internal enemy, which ensures the failure of their efforts to stabilize their knowledges.” [Gillian Rose. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 1993. Page 101.]

“[Theodor] Adorno’s work draws on traditions inherited from Marxian and non-Marxian criticism of [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s philosophy, and on the pre-Marxian writings of [Georg] Lukács and of [Walter] Benjamin as much as on their Marxian writings. Interpretation of Adorno suffers when his aims and achievements are related solely to Marx or to a Marxian tradition which is sometimes undefined and sometimes overdefined, and, equally, when he is judged solely as a sociologist. Here, Adorno’s thought is introduced and discussed in its own right, ‘immanently,’ to use his own term. Where appropriate, Adorno’s engagement with and transformation of the many intellectual traditions which inform his work is examined.” [Gillian Rose. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction To The Thought Of Theodor W. Adorno. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“Cultural geography as a subdiscipline has long argued for the importance of cultural artifacts of many kinds in mediating human experiences of place, space and landscape. Much of this work continues to be shaped by concepts developed as part of what was called ‘the new cultural geography.’ As is well-known, the new cultural geography emerged in the second half of the 1980s, when influential arguments were made for a more theoretically-engaged and more critical cultural geography.” [Gillian Rose, “Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies: Interface, network and friction.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 40, number 3, 2016. Pages 334-351.]

“Traditions are constructed: written, spoken, visualized, taught, lived. Traditions are representations of a past and the specific aspect of this complex process of representation I want to consider is the way in which the construction of a particular tradition is also always a practice of inclusion and exclusion. In terms of geographical traditionalizing, certain people or kinds of people are included as relevant to the tradition under construction and others are deemed irrelevant.” [Gillian Rose, “Tradition and Paternity: Same Difference?” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Volume 20, number 4, 1995. Pages 414-416.]

“I propose to return to the pathos of [Jacques] Derrida’s De l’esprit to its logos; to expose the logos lurking in its elegeia [a reflective poem]: to argue that the simultaneous disavowal and displacement of the predicament of diremption results in the ‘ontologizing’ of violence as revelation, as what is ‘laid bare.’” [Gillian Rose, “Of Derrida’s Spirit.” New Literary History. Volume 24, number 2, spring 1993. Pages 447-465.]

“While this paper focuses on issues of Midrashim [Hebrew/ʿIḇəriyṯ, מִדְרָשִׁים, Miḏərāšiym, explanations or commentaries] and Judaism as politics rather than ethics, it offers fundamental bearings on the conceptualisation of law. It proposes a model of doing politics as politics: ‘the risk of action arising out of the negotiation of law,’ a revision of Hannah Arendt’s discursive and antinomian idea of constitution-making. With the help of [John Greville Agard ‘J. G. A.’] Pocock’s civic republicanism, I launch a study of the Judaic body politic, a topic massively neglected in mainstream scholarship, which has been promoting the Hebraic paradigm. This study draws on the political experience and wisdom of the Jews as embodied in their civic consciousness. It is constitutional rather than religious literacy that is here explored.” [Gillian Rose, “‘Would That They Forsake Me but Observe My Torah’: Midrash and Political Authority.” The Modern Law Review. Volume 58, number 4, July 1995. Pages 471-485.]

“[Gillian] Rose interprets her childhood dyslexia and ocular problems as being symptomatic of her unconscious rebellion ‘against the law, the tradition of the fathers, and against the precipitous fortress of the family.’ The ‘blind protestanism’ that produced her dyslexia also created the means of its cultivation. Reading, Rose informs us, became the ‘repository of my inner self-relation’; a means ‘of distance from and deviousness towards myself as well as others,’ and a way of securing a ‘personal, protestant inwardness and independence.’ But, ‘as with the varieties of historical Protestantism, progenitor of modernity’, her newly won independence came at the cost of the ‘incessant anxiety of autonomy.’” [Anthony Gorman, “Gillian Rose’s critique of violence.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 197, May/June 2016. Pages 25-35.]

“My purpose in this chapter is to show how an interest in the power of gender ideologies in discourse developed in linguistic anthropology, and to locate what I went on to learn about gender ideologies in Tonga within that tradition. I first take up how gender ideologies emerged as a factor in men’s domination of women in the political theory of the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then I discuss how feminist anthropologists took up the topic in cross-cultural research. This work emphasized men’s control over the public sphere and women’s exclusion from the public sphere as an exercise of power that was bolstered and justified by negative gender ideologies about women.” [Susan U. Philips, “The Power of Gender Ideologies in Discourse.” The Handbook of Language and Gender. Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Pages 252-276.]

“… we think it might be useful to consider the long and rich history of progressive activism in medicine. This history dates back (at least) to the early nineteenth century when the systematic study of the relationships between society, disease, and medicine began in earnest. This study—and the forms of medical practice derived from it—became known as ‘social medicine.’ Over time the term ‘social medicine’ took on varied meanings as it was adapted to differing societies and diverse social conditions. Nonetheless, certain common principles underlie the term:

[Matthew R. Anderson, Lanny Smith, and Victor W. Sidel, “What is Social Medicine?” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 56, issue 8, January 2005. Pages 27-34.]

“Prosumption emerges from this space between creation and generation, between mediated lifeworlds and corporate pocketbooks. This is the scene of contestation and complicity, where subjects’ consumptive energies on discrete social media platforms are milled through a digital ecosystem to be repurposed through a variety of monetization schemes, for which contextual advertising is only a small part. This is the scene of ambition and ambivalence, where subjects in post-Fordist and postcrunch economies engage in a (rigged) game of cyber-entrepreneurship and feel empowered to sell their productive energies in the digital marketplace.” [Aleena Chia, “Welcome to Me-Mart: The Politics of User-Generated Content in Personal Blogs.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 56, number 4, 2012. Pages 421-438.]

“… prosumption … [is] production in the nonmoney economy.” [Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. Revolutionary Wealth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2006. Pages 157.]

“… the Web itself was a result of prosumption.” [Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. Revolutionary Wealth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2006. Page 178.]

“Over the long pull, however, we can expect education also to change. More learning will occur outside, rather than inside, the classroom. Despite the pressure from unions, the years of compulsory schooling will grow shorter, not longer. Instead of rigid age segregation, young and old will mingle. Education will become more interspersed and interwoven with work, and more spread out over a lifetime. And work itself—whether production for the market or prosumption for use in the home—will probably begin earlier in life than it has in the last generation or two. For just such reasons. Third Wave civilization may well favor quite different traits among the young—less responsiveness to peers, less consumption-orientation, and less hedonistic self-involvement.” [Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1980. Page 400.]

“The place of [Karl] Marx’s thought within the philosophy of time is thus, to a large extent, the key to the relationship of his thought to the modern European philosophical tradition more generally.…

“… any development of Marx’s philosophical legacy needs to secure three claims: (1) the existence of distinctively social being (this is Marx’s concept of the human); (2) a distinctive temporality associated with this social human being (a temporality rooted in social production); (3) that this distinctively human temporality is – or at least has come to be – ‘historical’ in the sense associated with philosophical concepts of history.”

[Peter Osborne, “Marx and the philosophy of time.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 147, January/February 2008. Pages 15-22.]

“The oft-remarked methodological differences between analytical philosophy and phenomenology are fully exemplified in their approaches to time: the method of more or less formalized analysis of statements in which temporal words occur, as against the method of more or less transcendental reflection on the experiences in which temporal concepts are supposed to be rooted. Accordingly, analytical philosophy of time interprets the relation between dynamic and static aspects of time in terms of the distinction between tensed and tenseless statements, thereby bringing the metaphysics of time within the semantics of propositional truth. By contrast, phenomenology investigates time at pre-propositional levels, appealing to sub-linguistic meanings encountered in experience or ‘constituted’ by consciousness.” [Roger McLure. The Philosophy of Time: Time before times. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Page 4.]

“… I write of a ‘politics of time’ – indeed, of all politics as centrally involving struggles over the experience of time. How do the forms of the social practices in which we engage structure and produce, enable or distort different senses of time? What kinds of experience of history do they make possible or inhibit? Whose future do they ensure? … A politics of time would attend to the temporal logic of these structures insofar as they open onto, or foreclose, specific historical possibilities, in distinctive temporal modes. It would rethink the political significance of social practices from the standpoint of their temporal forms.” [Peter Osborne, “The Politics of Time.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 68, autumn 1994. Pages 3-9.]

“How best, … after the dissipation of the postmodern illusion, to characterize … the cultural logic of high capitalism today? …

“… [A] new form of temporality produced by the globalization of the social processes grounding the temporality of modernity is best grasped not simply as the spatial extension of the temporality of modernity (the logic of the new), the aforementioned ‘global modernity,’ but by the term ‘contemporaneity’: that is, as a new, internally disjunctive global historical–temporal form, a totalizing (but not thereby ‘total,’ since it is open to no more than a distributive unification), radically disjunctive, contemporaneity.”

[Peter Osborne, “The postconceptual condition: Or, the cultural logic of high capitalism today.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 184, March/April 2014. Pages 19-27.]

“We are bound together on a precarious passage to a land unknown and unnamed. Even a stray dog, as Hannah Arendt once noted, has better odds of surviving when given a name. Likewise, the global future—the place to which we are headed—needs an identity to encourage us to own and care for it. A suitable coinage ought to conjure the nature of the beast: a borderless community intertwining the destinies of all earthly creatures, living and unborn. Like a superordinate country, this incipient formation is encircling all existing countries in an integral sphere of land, sea, and sky. Let us call this proto-country Earthland.” [Paul Raskin. Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization. Boston, Massachusetts: Tellus Institute. 2016. Page v.]

“Planetized consciousness is a momentous step in the maturation of human culture. As it more and more permeates twenty-first-century mindsets, the practical work of building the institutional scaffolding and functional apparatus for planetary democracy can proceed.” [Paul Raskin. Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization. Boston, Massachusetts: Tellus Institute. 2016. Creative Commons. Page 62.]

“… it has become axiomatic that the globe is the natural political unit for managing common affairs: sustaining the biosphere and keeping the peace, of course, but also cultivating an organic planetary civilization in its many dimensions. Indeed, Earthland’s thriving world culture and demos stand as the apotheoses of the transformation. At least that would be the view of the graying generations of the Great Transition, if not of the restless youth who, taking the Commonwealth for granted, look for new frontiers of transformation in space colonization (and certainly not for the fringe Eco-communal parties that indulge the rhetoric of Balkanization).” [Paul Raskin. Earthland: Scenes from a Civilized Future. Washington, D.C.: The Next System Project. 2017. Page 9.]

“This book is an inquiry into the nature of beauty and art. It presents a comprehensive theory of aesthetics that emerges from the analysis of the concepts of order and disorder, their various types and interrelations. The theory is based on the fundamental claim that beauty is an expression of a particular type of order, namely the aesthetic order. Art is presented as the product of the attempt to master this order and thereby create beauty.

“Beauty is paradoxical. The experience of beauty is imbued with a sense of order and necessity—a beautiful object creates the impression that its elements complement each other and are rightly situated. However, the fact that there are neither constitutive nor stipulative rules that govern beauty appears to stand in contrast to the idea that beauty expresses order. In what sense, then, is beauty a form of order? A standard solution forces us to choose one of the following positions: either there are principles of beauty that have not yet been discovered and await philosophical and scientific examination, or there are no aesthetic principles, and beauty is therefore an expression of disorder. The theory presented in this book accepts neither of these positions; it strives to explain beauty in terms of lawless order. This inquiry demonstrates that the paradoxical concept of ‘lawless order’ captures the paradoxical nature of beauty—captures, but does not solve it. The theory of lawless order does not pretend to remove the inherent paradox of beauty. It attempts to exploit the paradox as a means for understanding the peculiarities of the aesthetic experience.”

[Ruth Lorand. Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 1.]

“The passage from early to late modernity is generally associated with a gradual process of democratization, in both political and economic realms. Politically speaking, representative democracy has enjoyed an unprecedented global spread. In the West, especially, political and social rights seemed to have flourished until quite recently.… Up to a certain point the two processes progressed together, which is how the system managed to co-opt popular pressures and social movements and create relative stability: by largely replacing prohibition with commanded enjoyment and disciplinary power with the productive regulation of desire. Both pillars of this process are currently in crisis. The crisis first affected the political realm, marking the post-democratic mutation of representative democracy.” [Yannis Stavrakakis, “Debt society: Greece and the future of post-democracy.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 181, September/October 2013. Pages 33-38.]

“It is suggested that John Dewey’s proposals for the revitalization of philosophy are relevant to the recovery of the project of critical social theory.…

“… [There is] Dewey’s understanding of the mission of philosophy and how that mission might contribute to a reconstruction of American society in a desirable direction. In order to fulfill its mission, Dewey argues, philosophy must practice a type of cultural hermeneutics—a practice that puts Dewey squarely in the historicist camp. Moral and political philosophy becomes thereby a form of critical social theory whose purpose is to interpret for citizens and communities the implications and consequences of social change.…

“… Philosophy, Dewey argues, lacks clear purpose; it has lost touch with its constantly changing milieu. Philosophers, therefore, must reconstitute their project if the latter is to contribute to a humane and progressive recon struction of their societies in response to recent economic, scientific, and institutional developments.”

[Robert J. Kent, “Dewey and the Project of Critical Social Theory.” Social Thought & Research. Volume 23, number 1/2, 2000. Pages 1-43.]

“In the late 1960s and 1970s left-wing radicals on every continent struggled against what they viewed as a world system of imperialist oppression with myriad local manifestations. Galvanized by a transnational imagination, they sought to internationalize movements that were practically national and domesticate ideas borrowed from differing sociopolitical milieus. In this context, the death of Che Guevara, a high-profile proponent of worldwide socialist revolution, wasmomentous. Many radicals came to see him as a martyr for revolutionary internationalism, and thus the resurrected guerrilla functioned as a symbolic common denominator across diverse movements. Che and other shared heroes affirmed a seeming unity of attitudes and offered psychological solace that each movement, no matter how marginal, was part of a global fight for social justice.…

“… Che was the only figure championed simultaneously by Greek anti-austerity demonstrators, Yemeni critics of the Ali Abdullah Saleh government, and Occupy activists in the US. His most important legacy may therefore not be as a guerrilla tactician or a popular T-shirt design, but as a perennial symbol for alternative social and political possibilities.

“… consider the most powerful form of kleptography, described in a recent Internet Engineering Task Force document: ‘A highly effective form of kleptography would be to make the cryptographic system so difficult to use that nobody would bother to do so.’ Even better than the work of carefully, covertly back-dooring some piece of communications hardware, just make the available systems so tedious, time-consuming, annoying or opaque to use that people, by and large, simply don’t – they send their messages in clear and hope for the best, or try not to think about it. This is the world in which we actually live, and it presents another challenge for critique, for art practice, for design and for aesthetics. The work of security as a way of communicating and a way of living has much to offer: literacy in hardware, software and infrastructure; an approach to law and spaces of sovereignty, imperial control and freedom; the labour of affinity, community and trust; and areas of mathematics with just as much to offer contemporary philosophy (and more immediate political applications) than set theory. As we put a stake through the heart of the theatrical kitsch of state surveillance, can we make the practice of liberated security as an element of daily life interesting, compelling, exciting and beautiful? Can we make secrecy, our secrecy, into an art?” [Finn Brunton, “Kleptography.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 183, January/February 2014. Pages 2-6.]

“The secret to this scalability and participation lies on the plane of ontology. The political power of Anonymous cannot be separated from its strange world of memes, a unit of self-replicating culture originally theorized by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. On the Internet, strange phenomena such as putting cats inside baked bread – or using simple tools to take down a website in revenge for the repression of WikiLeaks – can spread across the world within minutes. The rise in participation in Anonymous can be directly linked to the ongoing collapse of personal identity, a phenomenon most clearly expressed by unemployed ‘digital native’ youth and those marginalized by established social forms. Anonymous is not just another political movement; it represents the first expression of an ontology that follows from the collapse of the hitherto existing form of the individual subject.” [Harry Halpin, “The philosophy of Anonymous: Ontological politics without identity.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 196, November/December 2012. Pages 19-28.]

“The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.* If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory,’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catchs on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.”

[Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. 30ᵗʰ anniversary edition. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Page 192.]

“To judge from its practitioners and from its critics there seem to be at least three intellectual types: Vulgar Marxism, Sophisticated Marxism, and Plain Marxism.

“Vulgar Marxists (as we have seen) seize upon certain ideological features of [Karl] Marx’s political philosophy and identify these parts as the whole. This is true of adherents as well as of critics. We need here say no more about this type.

“Sophisticated Marxists are much more complicated. They are mainly concerned with marxism as a model of society and with the theories developed with the aid of this model.…

“Sophisticated marxists generally are commited to current marxist practice on political as well as on intellectual grounds. Consequently, they tend to incorporate into ‘Marxism’ the whole tradition of sociology, before and after Marx.…

“Plain Marxists (whether in agreement or in disagree meat) work in Marx’s own tradition. They understand Marx, and many later Marxists as well, to be firmly a part of the classic tradition of sociological thinking. They treat Marx like any great nineteenth century figure, in a scholarly way; they treat each later phase of marxism as historically specific. They are generally agreed that Marx’s work bears the trademarks of the nineteenth-century society, but that his general model and his ways of thinking are central to their own intellectual history and remain relevant to their attempts to grasp present day social worlds.”

[C. Wright Mills. The Marxists. New York: A Laurel Edition imprint of Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1962. Pages 96-98.]

“Since [C. Wright] Mills never belonged to any political party – indeed, he probably never even voted – it was the Plain Marxists that were more interesting to Mills. Mills defined a Plain Marxist as someone who works ‘in [Karl] Marx’s own tradition,’ whether in agreement or disagreement with him.” [Clyde W. Barrow, “Plain Marxists, Sophisticated Marxists, and C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite.” Science & Society. Volume 71, number 4, October 2007. Pages 400-430.]

“My own impression is that [C. Wright] Mills, in spite of his serious plea for incorporation of what he calls ‘plain marxism’ into social science, is more Weberian than Marxian. In all his essential ideas, e.g., power, power elite, politics, state, stratification, society, bureaucracy or marxism, Mills is far more closer to [Max] Weber than to [Karl] Marx.” [Bipul Kumar Bhadra. The Political Sociology of C. Wright Mills. M.A. thesis. McMaster University. Hamilton, Ontario. July, 1978. Page 37.]

“[C. Wright] Mills identified himself … with this tradition [plain Marxism] but also stressed that ‘plain Marxists’ had generally been among the losers, who had not been ‘enchurched,’ had been theorists rather than political actors, and had stressed the humanism of Marxism, especially of the younger Marx. Similarly, they had stressed the role of superstructure in history and the complex interplay of base and superstructure; they had been open in their interpretations and uses of Marxism, stressing that ‘economic determinism’ was a matter of degree, and that an important element of freedom and individual responsibility remained ….” [Michael Newman, “Mills, Miliband and Marxism.” C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination: Contemporary Perspectives. John Scott and Ann Nilsen, editors. Cheltenham, England, and Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing. 2013. Pages 105-128.]

“The emerging interdisciplinary research on stop-and-frisk has explored the inefficiency, disruptiveness, and racial disparities endemic to the practice …. Further, stop-and-frisk is identified as part of the expansion of policing powers and discussed in the context of the relationship of policing to the broader US carceral apparatus …. However, most of this scholarship has been empirical and/or historical. By shifting the terrain of the law-and-society analysis to the normative, this essay seeks to rearticulate and reestablish the political and ethical stakes of the carceral state and its inhering social control. This approach also builds on recent work in other areas of political thought … which employ political theory that is more acutely attendant to emergent political realities. In examining the inter-relationship between contemporary forms of racial and class control, this article contributes to the growing generation of critical race theory that critiques the so-called post-racial moment.” [Wendy Wright, “Finding a Home in the Stop-and-Frisk Regime.” Social Justice. Volume 43, number 3, fall 2017. Pages 25-45.]

“Often, we’re given two choices (e.g., soup or salad; which one’s clearer, 1 or 2), but education isn’t that simple. As teacher educators, we know that concepts traditionally thought of as binaries (e.g., male or female) are now thought of as a continuum. Other concepts operate more as a both/and rather than an either/or. For example, we do not teach grammar or writing, we teach both at the same time.

“Three years ago when I was in graduate school at North Carolina State University, I sought the advice of my mentor Hiller Spires, as was often the case. I was debating about whether to focus the course I was teaching on traditional literacy or new literacies. She said, ‘Embrace the and.’ This was a lightbulb moment for me.”

[Shea Kerkhoff, “Embracing the And.” English Education. Volume 49, number 4, July 2017. Pages 316-319.]

“‘You want to know why Americans took over the world, Hack? Because they respect achievement. Before this was a USA country, our ideal was the working-class battler, for Christ’s sake. If Australians ruled the world, everyone would work one day a week and bitch about the pay.’ He shook his head. ‘Then there’s the British, who thought there was something wrong with making money. No surprise they ended up kissing the colony’s ass. The Japanese, they think the pinnacle of achievement is a Government job. The Chinese are Communist, the Germans are Socialists, the Russians are broke…who does that leave?’” [Max Berry. Jennifer Government. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2004. Kindle edition.]

“Max Barry began removing parts at an early age. In 1999, he successfully excised a steady job at tech giant HP [Hewlett-Packard] in order to upgrade to the more compatible alternative of manufacturing fiction. While producing three novels, he developed the online nation simulation game NationStates, as well as contributing to various open source software projects and developing religious views on operating systems. He did not leave the house much. For Machine Man, Max wrote a website to deliver pages of fiction to readers via e-mail and RSS [Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary]. He lives in Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters, and is thirty-eight years old. He uses vi.” [Max Berry. Machine Man. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2011. Pages 2.]

“Most writings about social scripting theory are geared toward professional or academic audiences. When it comes to using social scripting theory in counseling or therapy, this means that the application to clients is indirect at best.…

“How might therapists interject social script theory in addressing sexual problems? Starting with an introduction to the general concept of social scripts … as well as providing common examples with which clients can identify, it is hoped that clients will see that scripts are necessary for all of us to be able to function in society. Social scripts provide predictability, lessen anxiety, and reduce the amount of time and energy we have to devote to making sense out of our social worlds. Extending these principles to sexual scripts, clients can come to appreciate the need for sexual scripts, particularly early in a relationship.”

[Michael W. Wiederman, “The Gendered Nature of Sexual Scripts.” The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Familes. Volume 13, number 4, October 2005. Pages 496-502.]

“[Michael W.] Wiederman … proposes a Social Script theory to explain how individuals can be influenced by deeply held cultural beliefs about their sexuality. This theory is based on the assumption that individuals learn how to think, feel, and behave from members of the culture in which they are raised, through scripts or deeply ingrained communications, which are learned within cultures …. These scripts provide meaningful guidelines as to the appropriate timing and expression of certain behaviors, including sexual activity ….” [Lorel Mayberry and Jacqueline Daniel, “‘Birthgasm’: A Literary Review of Orgasm as an Alternative Mode of Pain Relief in Childbirth.” Journal of Holistic Nursing. Volume XX, number X, November 2015. Pages 1-12.]

“The social script theory is based on the cognitive psychological analysis on human behavior and action. As a language teacher, I’m interested in the possibilities for applying it in the teaching of the Chinese language and culture. In this essay, I will compare the social script theory with a language teaching approach, the Performed Culture Pedagogy that has been carried out in the last decade in the Department of East Asia Language and Literature, Ohio State University, USA …. I will also illustrate the importance of the social scripts while learning language and the necessity of performing the culture while teaching Chinese. However, there are still problems to be solved in the development of the social script theory and the application of the Performance-Based Pedagogy and this essay will also address them.” [Huang Hong, “The Performance-Based Culture.” Intercultural Communication Studies. Volume XVII, number 1, 2008. Pages 126-131.]

“Social learning and social script theory provided a framework for viewing a person’s reaction to feeling lonely …. Individuals learn to label a social context of only one person as ‘being alone’ and label one’s feeling in that setting as loneliness. Depending on one’s gender, individuals also learn differential reactions to feelings of loneliness.” [David Knox, Karen Vail-Smith, and Marty Zusman, “The Lonely College Male.” International Journal of Men’s Health. Volume 6, number 3, fall 2007. Pages 273-279..]

“Social scripts are not universal. They are different from one culture to another in one way or another. In some situations social scripts differ slightly whereas in other situations they differ dramatically. In the former case, people in a new culture will experience little or no culture shock while in the latter case people will experience culture shock to a great extent. In cross-cultural communication how to mediate the externalization of social scripts according to specific situations is a big question. On the one hand, social scripts are internalized in a particular culture, usually one’s native culture. On the other hand, social scripts may occur across cultures.” [Hongdang Meng, “Social Script Theory and Cross-Cultural Communication.” Intercultural Communication Studies. Volume XVII, number 1, 2008. Pages 132-138.]

“Activity theory … and social script theory explain how psychological is grounded in cultural activities. As a matter of fact, cognitive linguistics suffers from the same weakness. It can construct a personal model of culture within the individual, but it cannot explain how this model is socially constructed. A child learns by doing things, by following others, by trying to emulate them, by trying to make his world similar to their world. There is agency involved in these events. The agency comes from the child, but it is an attempt to emulate the social world and the cultural world that he is immersed in. He uses social scripts and language as learning tools and experiential devices to navigate within that milieu.” [Robert N. St. Clair, “Social Scripts and the Three Theoretical Approaches to Culture.” Intercultural Communication Studies. Volume XVII, number 4, 2008. Pages 171-183.]

“Social script theory, a sociologically-based theory, is thought to provide explanation for individual behaviours and beliefs …. [Michael W.] Wiederman argues that social scripts are learned through being raised in a particular culture and/or through a significant attachment to a particular cultural group …. Social scripts are learned directives for personal actions and values which then play out in the personal and social lives of those who have learned the script. Social script theory may provide an alternative lens through which to look at women’s health and in particular, sexual health, in the population of women who are experiencing poverty and use drugs.” [Donna Lynn Ward. Social Scripts: A Concept Analysis. Master of Nursing thesis. University of Victoria, Victoria. British Columbia. January 2014. Page 8.]

“Although the current study does not test social scripting theory, the formulation and consequences of sex script adherence contributes conceptually to this analysis as a useful framework for understanding how women make safety-related decisions in intimate contexts. Thus, a variety of cognitions and behaviors may inform an individual’s expectation of events in heterosexual encounters and her perceptions of and responses to risk. Specifically, adherence to traditional gender roles, rape myth acceptance, pornography consumption, alcohol intoxication, sorority affiliation, and prior victimization experiences may inform a woman’s sex scripts and influence the way she processes and reacts to danger.” [Cortney A. Franklin, “Anticipating Intimacy or Sexual Victimization? Danger Cue Recognition and Delayed Behavioral Responses to a Sexually Risky Scenario.” Feminist Criminology. Volume 8, number 2, April 2013. Pages 87-116.]

“It is suggested that if Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is to fulfil its potential as an approach to cultural and historical science in general, then an interdisciplinary concept of activity is needed. Such a concept of activity would provide a common foundation for all the human sciences, underpinning concepts of, for example, state and social movement equally as, for example, learning and personality. For this is needed a clear conception of the ‘unit of analysis’ of activity, i.e., of what constitutes ‘an activity,’ and a clear distinction between the unit of analysis and the substance, i.e., ultimate reality underlying all the human sciences: artifact-mediated joint activity.” [Andy Blunden, “An Interdisciplinary Concept of Activity.” Outlines. Number 1, 2009. Pages 1-26.]

“Activity theory can and must shed light on identity-formation, interpersonal relationships such as solidarity, loyalty, friendship, ethical commitment, respect for law, pursuit of science, political affiliation, religious identity, ability to cooperate with others, the acquisition of cultural competences and so on. Societies are not homogeneous. The dogmatic identification of the objective meaning of all activity with the interests of an abstractly-conceived ‘society,’ blocks the way to the solution of these problem, and therefore makes the formation of a coherent theory of activity impossible.

“Activity Theory is very well placed to make a significant contribution to the study of identity formation, but to do so it must let go of the idea of ‘objective’ identity which is determined not by criteria immanent in the experience of an individual, but according to abstract collectivities determined by the theorist’s preconceptions.”

[Andy Blunden. An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2010. Page 227.]

“The first step towards independence of the Psyche from immediate concern with its feelings is Habit. The acquisition of Habits applies to all grades of mental action. The sense in which Hegel uses the word roughly corresponds to the meaning of ‘operations’ in Activity Theory—actions which by repetition become automatic, freeing the mind from having to pay attention to the execution of simple actions. Thanks to Habit, we can ‘chew gum and walk at the same time.’ Habit can be refined so as to be regarded as an aptitude or skill, being able to do something without thinking.

“… the benefits we have procured from nature have declined by 30 per cent over the last sixty years, and that this loss is due to an insufficient valuation of nature.…

“Value … is a means of producing differentiation that is always interested, in the sense of how value designates what matters, to whom, and where (ontologically and geographically). Through these differentiated processes of valuation, radically different biotic entities emerge. If relation defies subject status (entities come into being through their relations, rather than pre-existing things that then form relations), and the one is because of and indebted to the many (we are indebted in all sorts of cultural and corporeal ways to ‘others’ that enable our living well, from stomach bacteria to animal test subjects that bear the burden of disease so that we might not have to), then biodiversifying can be thought as becoming: the active ground of evolution.”

[Kathryn Yusoff, “The valuation of nature: The Natural Choice White Paper.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 170, November/December 2011. Pages 2-7.]

“A truly radical enactivism differs in important respects from the more conspicuous and already well-established branches of enactivism— Sensorimotor Enactivism and Autopoietic Enactivism. While REC shares much with, and owes much, to its sister accounts, there are significant differences between some of its commitments and what is on offer in these frameworks. In this chapter we highlight these and identify what we take to be the most serious and fundamental challenge facing any bona fide content-free version of enactivism.” [Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2013. Page 23.]

“Radical enactivism firmly sets its face against computationally inspired cognitivism and its I-conceptions of the mind—those that characterize mentality as essentially disembodied and decontextualized. E-approaches reject the view that cognition is essentially an off-stage, behind-the-scenes computational and calculative activity that can be cleanly distinguished from the messy details of how organisms exist in and interact with their environments.…

“In rejecting the idea that our primary engagements with the world are content-involving, radical versions of enactivism and embodied cognition assume that organisms can act, react, and interact in psychologically pertinent ways without representing, reasoning, or thinking about the world in contentful ways. In sum, radical enactivism offers a fundamentally different vision of what unifies psychology than that proposed by cognitivism.”

[Daniel D. Hutto, “Psychology Unified: From Folk Psychology to Radical Enactivism.” Review of General Psychology. Volume 17, number 2, June 2013. Pages 174-178.]

“Sceptics about the pervasiveness of mindreading doubt that all forms of attending to and keeping track of another’s mental states require the use of mindreading capacities understood in the restrictive sense just described. They doubt that our basic ways of engaging with other minds requires making any conceptually-based mentalistic attributions at any level at all. Neither the attribution of mental state concepts nor the attribution of mental state contents plays any part in basic ways of responding to and keeping track of others’ psychological attitudes. If this is correct then there are embodied and enactive ways of relating to others and attending to their states of mind that do not constitute acts of mindreading for the simple reason that they do not involve making mentalistic attributions.” [Daniel D. Hutto, “Understanding Fictional Minds without Theory of Mind!” Style. Volume 45, number 2, summer 2011. Pages 276-282.]

“In rejecting the idea that our primary engagements with the world are content-based, my brand of enactivism – which I call radical enactivism – insists that organisms act, react and interact meaningfully long before they can think using concepts and symbols (should they ever come to do the latter) …. It offers a completely different starting point for thinking about our fundamental ways of engaging with the world and others than that proposed by cognitivism. At least in basic cases such encounters do not involve the processing of perceptual content via the way station of representations.” [Daniel D. Hutto, “Limited Engagements and Narrative Extensions.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Volume 16, number 3, July 2008. Pages 419-444.]

“… primary forms of social interaction are about shaping and being shaped by others – being ‘transformed’ by and ‘transforming’ others – through unprincipled embodied engagements. Radical enactivism enables us to make best sense of these engagements by providing the right set of tools for understanding intentionality and experience in non-representationalist terms.” [Daniel D. Hutto, “Interacting? Yes. But, of what kind and on what basis?” Consciousness and Cognition. Volume 18, issue 2, June 2009. Pages 543-546.]

“This paper explores the multivocality of the camps and the kinds of social and human aspirations that support their formation and their persistence. If there is a single univocality across the multiple displays of ‘campitude’ it is that humans are almost defined by their capacity for and insistence on movement – even when that last camp is part of a mode of death, a destination from which those humans do not emerge, and to which that movement has been compelled and not chosen freely. But that multivocality is also about the social memory of the camp experience and about the ways in which in the twentieth century the memory of a specific type of camp would come to define the darkest parts, the ‘midnight of the century,’ in the words of Victor Serge. The temporary habitations of those tents and those of the medieval world, and of course even more so those of prehistory, redefine the very essence of traces, for their traces in the material, geological records and in memory are faint and easily dispersed.…

“… campitude offers a new formulary for inhabitation, new imaginaries of how communities can exist, and novel formulations for what one can experience being part of them. Campitude offers both speculative architectures and new routes for future subjectivities, coalescing less in a ‘community’ than in a myriad of permeable coalitions, collectivities and self-definitions, changing and transforming, emerging and declining all of the time.…

“It may be that the temporary inhabitations of the Neolithic revolution and the subsequent projects to dominate nature were the beginning of forms of ultrasociality which would culminate in our potential new Anthropocene epoch – an epoch in which human intervention is signalled within the geological record itself. It may also be that new speculative architectures and urbanisms have to rethink that relationship to geology as well as attend to new forms of sociality which are not quite so inscriptive upon the earth and its records. In fact it is in those temporary socialities, coming into being and fading, and in those new concatenations of peoples living together, that the real lessons of campitude can be observed.”

[Martyn Hudson, “Theorising Camps and Campitude.” Heathwood Institute and Press. October 20th, 2015. Online publication. No pagination.]

“[Slavoj] Žižek’s Schellingian-Hegelian ontology [i.e., Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel] allows for charting the immanent genesis of the transcendent, for preserving the parallax split of idealism without conceding that an ideal plane of immateriality eternally transcends what transpires at the level of the material Real. This transcendental materialism (as an account of a more-than-material yet non-epiphenomenal subject derived from a specific ontology of the Real) requires a reworked conception of the very nature of the substance of being.

“Consequently, what Žižek proposes is an ephemeral, aleatory materialism in which the autonomous negativity of subjectivity is able to move from an ‘in itself’ status as substance’s inner inconsistency (i.e., as a not-yet-subjectified subject) to a ‘for itself’ status in which a clear contrast is visible between itself and its various enveloping matrices of mediation (i.e., as a subjectified subject).”

[Adrian Johnston. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 2008. Kindle edition.]

“Over the past several years, I have gradually constructed and refined the position I label ‘transcendental materialism’ within a context informed by a number of live fault lines of theoretical tensions. More precisely, these specific fault lines are rifts between stances (my own and those with which I engage) relating to each other in the above-described promising manner of combining argumentative ferocity with interpretive generosity. Whatever I might have to contribute to certain ongoing conversations in philosophy/ theory today, I owe to a wonderfully motley ensemble, a sparklingly multifaceted Marxian ‘general intellect,’ of superb interlocutors and debating partners. Transcendental materialism has taken shape in fashions very much determined by its chosen significant others.

“The chapters of this book contain, among other things, treatments of a number of living figures along lines informed by transcendental materialism. The current thinkers addressed here include, to provide a non-exhaustive list, Alain Badiou, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Martin Hägglund, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Claude Milner, Colette Soler, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupančič. Reflecting the invaluable historical sensibilities of the intellectual traditions of Continental Europe, these authors, as anyone familiar with them knows, draw deeply and broadly from the history of ideas (philosophical, psychoanalytic, political) in the process of building their own bodies of concepts. Moreover, like all of the people just mentioned, I view the history of ideas (especially as regards philosophy and psychoanalysis) as not merely historical.”

[Adrian Johnston. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2014. Pages 1-2.]

“… insofar as the word ‘dialectical’ nowadays tends to connote hazy notions of integration and synthesis, it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate for [Slavoj] Žižek to describe his monism of the not-All One as a materialism that is recognizably dialectical. Instead, Žižek’s tethering of so-called dialectical materialism to an ontology of a self-sundering substance internally generating parallax-style antinomies and oppositions seems more like a sort of genetic transcendentalism, a theory centered on the model of a trajectory involving the immanent genesis of the thereafter-transcendent (that is, an emergentist supplement to Kantian transcendental idealism). One could call this theory ‘transcendental materialism,’ defined as a doctrine based on the thesis that materiality manufactures out of itself that which comes to detach from and achieve independence in relation to it.” [Adrian Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View.” Diacritics. Volume 37, number 1. Pages 3–20.]

“… [My] ‘transcendental materialism’ [is] a materialism (of a ‘weak nature’) profoundly influenced by the natural sciences in which those phenomena and structures seeming to require theology for their expression are explained in a non-reductive-yet-non-religious fashion. At the intersection of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, the life sciences, and select philosophies, I seek to assemble a naturalist-materialist account of those denaturalized, more-than-material temporalities and subjectivities supposedly falling under the jurisdiction of theologies. In my view, one can remain completely committed to the secular legacy of the Enlightenment without thereby sooner or later resignedly condemning oneself to the lukewarm ethical-aesthetic nihilism of today’s biopolitical, pseudoscientific materialisms justly denounced by [Alain] Badiou and [Slavoj] Žižek.” [Adrian Johnston, “Adrian Johnston’s Reply to Clayton Crockett’s Review of His Book.” Political Theology. Volume 11, issue 1, 2010. Pages 158-160.]

“… one can make out the contours of what can perhaps only be designated by the oxymoron ‘transcendental materialism’ (proposed by Adrian Johnston): all reality is transcendentally constituted, ‘correlative’ to a subjective position, and, to push this throngh to the end, the way out of this ‘correlationist’ circle is not to try to directly reach the In-itself, but to inscribe this transcendental correlation into the Thing itself. The path to the In-itself leads through the subjective gap, since the gap between For-us and In-itself is immanent to the In-itself: appearance is itself ‘objective,’ therein resides the truth of the realist problem of ‘How can we pass from appearance For-us to reality In-itself?’

“It may appear that the basic defining feature of materialism is a commonsense trust in the reality of the external world—we do not live in the fancies of our imagination, caught up in its web, there is a rich and full-blooded world open to us out there. But this is the premise any serious form of dialectical materialism has to do away with: there is no ‘objective’ reality, every reality is already transcendentally constituted. ‘Reality’ is not the transcendent hard core that eludes our grasp, accessible to us only in a distorted perspectival approach; it is rather the very gap that separates different perspectival approaches.”

[Slavoj Žižek. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Brooklyn, New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2012. Pages 906-907.]

“Within transcendental materialism … the passage from nature to culture does not reveal a struggle of notional transmutation as culture endeavours to rid itself of its basis in nature in the onslaught of history with the promise of completion, but rather reveals a standstill in the heart of being that cannot be brought into a higher moment of truth of free spirit that would bring the circle of circles to an end: the ebb and flow of substance ontogenetically incites the birth of a freely existing subject only through a self-sabotaging, self-destructive movement that defies perfect reconciliation, because this unruliness inheres in all culturally achieved unity and disrupts it from within. Conflict, though here too internal to the system, articulates at this juncture of the passage from nature to culture an irrevocable place of rupture, devastation, or laceration in the absolute, which points to a dialectical residue that can never become a vehicle of internal growth of the structure of the world, yet that simultaneously sustains culture as the very attempt to overcome it. With culture, we see that nature had immanently produced an eruptive, shattering transcendence (the subject) that bursts the seams of any monistic wholeness and gets in the way of the immanent self-development of the absolute by instituting a new age of the world that can never be reconciled with that which came before, in a moment of ontological triumph. As a consequence, if we inscribe culture into the fabric of the universe according to the second model of dialectics, we are forced to conclude that the absolute is open, precarious, and necessarily incomplete, for the symbolic universe is not only constitutively out of joint with nature, but as the always doomed attempt to reconcile itself with the latter, is constantly forced to reinvent itself.” [Joseph Carew. Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press imprint of imprint of MPublishing. 2014. Creative Commons. Pages 156-147.]

“We are now in a position to describe a significant portion (though not yet the complete picture) of [Karl] Marx’s theory of proletarian revolutionary action. It goes more or less as follows: An ongoing and intensifying set of conditions and processes create a class of people who, unlike the French peasants, (i) share ‘manifold relations with one another,’ that is, live and work in communities, and (2) share a growing consensus to the effect that they have common interests, confront common problems, and can resolve these problems only through collective action. On these bases of community and consensus, local associations and organizations begin to emerge and, over time, to grow in number and size. And on the basis of these local organizations, a mass movement is eventually established and sustained.” [Daniel R. Sabia, Jr., “Rationality, Collective Action, and Karl Marx.” American Journal of Political Science. Volume 32, number 1, February 1988. Pages 50-71.]

“The main objective of unions in this country has been and continues to be attainment of control over wages, job conditions, and job security through collective bargaining. By and large, unions pursue these objectives individually by industry and by craft. Nonetheless, where these ends can be promoted through collective action, unions as a group have undertaken such action. While consciousness and expressions of solidarity have been for the most part confined to individual trades and industries, there are significant occasions on which such expressions have extended beyond trade and industry. Political actions by unions as a group directed toward the end of improving economic security and well-being for large sections of the working class have occurred and continue to occur. In these respects, social class action is a part of American labor history. Whether such actions will ever become revolutionary in character, as envisioned by [Karl] Marx, is a question that remains for history to answer.” [Douglas E. Booth, “Collective Action, Marx’s Class Theory, and the Union Movement.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 12, number 1, March 1978. Pages 163-185.]

“The cultural focus of the new left was a direct response to the emergence of systematic cultural manipulation by government and business in the mass-mediated world of the post-war period.…

“Subjected to new forms of control from above, the American people, or at least a significant fraction of it, innovated new forms of resistance and subversion based on cultural action from below. These new forms of action had the paradoxical property of enhancing the influence and support of the new left for several years while disorganizing it internally to such an extent that it soon disappeared from the scene.

“My purpose here is to explain this dialectic. Why was such an exciting and innovative movement so vulnerable to internal disruption, so chaotic, and so oppressive to those who participated in it that it failed to sustain and reproduce itself? I believe that through addressing this question we can learn a great deal about the specific weaknesses of movements based on cultural action from below. Perhaps if we can gain a better understanding of the problems of the new left, we will not be condemned to repeat its errors in the future.”

[Andrew Feenberg, “Paths to Failure: The Dialectics of Organization and Ideology in the New Left.” Humanities in Society. Fall 1983. Pages 393-419.]

“I shall develop an approach to the study of ideology which builds upon this critical conception of ideology. The analysis of ideology, I shall argue, is primarily concerned with the ways in which meaning and power intersect. It is concerned with the ways in which meaning is mobilized in the social world in the interests of powerful individuals or groups. Let me define this focus more sharply: to study ideology is to study the ways in which meaning serves to sustain relations of domination. There are three aspects of this formula which require elaboration: the concept of domination, the notion of meaning, and the ways in which meaning may serve to sustain relations of domination. In using the term ‘domination,’ I wish to highlight the distinction between power and domination. Relations of domination are a specific form of power relations, but they are not co-extensive with them. A satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon of power requires a detailed account of the relations between action, institutions and social structure, since each of these levels realizes an aspect of power ….” [John B. Thompson, “Language and ideology: a framework for analysis.” The Sociological Review. Volume 35, number 3, August 1987. Pages 516-536.]

“A political sociology of emotions should avoid cataloguing—but not completely. Some emotions are more relevant to politics than others are. Alternatively, if emotions are a response to instability then some emotions are more likely then others to emerge in the political sphere and have discernible political consequences. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle … argues that the moral persona of the speaker is as important a part of the rhetorical power to persuade as any intrinsic worth of the argument offered. Persuasion is ultimately about the distribution of individual and collective resources. The constraint and deployment of emotions is an essential component of rhetoric and by extension politics. Aristotle identifies ten emotions that he considers fundamental to human nature and thus fair game in the rhetorical repertoire. Of these ten, anger, calm, friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, pity and indignation, may be recalibrated in terms that apply to modem political organization. The remaining four, shame, favour, envy and jealousy are more applicable to discussions of feudal or tribal forms of political organization.” [Mabel Berezin, “Secure states: towards a political sociology of emotion.” The Sociological Review. Volume 50, supplement 2, October 2002. Pages 33-52.]

“I have argued for a re-conceptualization of self-organization which begins from the self-understandings of the agents in localized contexts, and which calls into question the prevailing conceptual frames to be discerned in much mainstream union and academic research literature. In the process, I have illustrated that trade union SOGs [self-organized groups] have a vital role in promoting a more diversified democracy and a more robust equalities agenda, but that a double jeopardy looms over their capacity to deliver the goods, in the guise of outer pressures towards bureaucratization and inner pressures towards homogenization. Of course there are limits to what we can reasonably expect trade unions or any groups operating within them to achieve – and on the efficacy score. SOGs seem to compare quite favourably with their host organization in terms of service-delivery to their respective constituencies.” [Jill C. Humphrey, “Self-organization and trade union democracy.” The Sociological Review. Volume 48, number 2, May 2000. Pages 262-282.]

“Just as the Roman Republic, after taking over Italy, began building an empire around the Mediterranean, so the American Republic extended its empire beyond the North American continent. Pursuing its manifest destiny in a flurry of military adventures in 1898, the United States seized Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, and Guam, Wake Island, and Manila in the Pacific. It then fought a long war of colonial subjugation in the Philippines, helped quell the Boxer Rebellion in China, and gained control of territory in Panama to build the canal. The United States thus finally joined the major European powers incarving out a worldwide empire.

“The way was prepared and the new phase of American imperialism justified by leading clergy and politicians in convenient concert.…

“Since European-style imperialism was ‘alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose,’ according to President McKinley, its apologists found euphemisms, such as ‘empire of peace’ and the Jeffersonian ‘empire of liberty.’ Following the British lead, the United States was now destined to create a ‘democratic empire,’ turning colonialism into a kind of tutelage in self-government—to be granted at some indefinitely future date. Since it was ‘destined to carry worldwide the principles of Anglo-Saxon peace and justice, liberty and law,’ it could even be called a ‘New Imperialism.’ Anticipating President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘new world order’ by two decades and (senior) George Bush’s by nearly nine, an 1898 salute to American power by the Catholic archbishop John Ireland proclaimed ‘a new order of things.’ Dissenters such as Senator Pettigrew argued that ‘manifest destiny is simply the cry of the strong in justification of their plunder of the weak.’ Yet as even establishment critics of American imperialism such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had to admit, the United States had a ‘record of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the nineteenth century.’”

[Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress. 2003. Pages 139-140.]

“One … issue is that of the reification of social facts, a discussion that has its roots in the Marxian notions of fetishism and ideology and has later been developed within the schools of so-called ‘critical theory.’ According to this view, certain facts (e.g. that there is a current unemployment of 8 per cent, a difference in the job prospects for men and women in the upper echelons of management, a large income differential between certain regions of the country, or a gap between the educational opportunities for children of working-class parents and children born into the higher classes) do not represent a genuine social reality. The belief that they do is an illusion, fostered by the process of reification. This means that the facts in question are easily changed, should we so desire, and owe their persistence to certain political or economic interests that they serve and by which they are reciprocally sustained. In other words, to be real, as opposed to being a reification, a social item must display a certain ‘robustness,’ or permanence. It must not occur only under a narrow range of conditions, especially not conditions controlled and manipulated by partisan interests.” [Finn Collin. Social reality. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 10.]

“The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula.… Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’ That ‘must,’ which for [Karl] Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.…

“The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. It is for just this reason that Dracula and Frankenstein, with rare exceptions, do not appear together.”

[Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear.” New Left Review. Series I, number 136, November–December 1982. Pages 67-85.]

“The interdependence of truth and crisis in tragedy anticipates the classical rhetoric of revolutionary politics.… The superior ‘morality’ of the General Strike lies in its forcing social actors to their ultimate forgotten ‘truth.’ It is never conceived by [Georges] Sorel as a process (as in Rosa Luxemburg’s roughly contemporary writings), but as a single, ‘instantaneous’ event. As an Apocalypse: the Moment of Truth.…

“… I certainly believe that it is virtually impossible to extricate the Left from the Right whenever the Left adopts a ‘tragic’ worldview. In an ironic reversal, the Moment of Truth turns out to be an ambiguous—perhaps the most ambiguous—of political mythologies. Which is, after all, the way it should be, since the vast difference between Left and Right is, first and foremost, a product of temporality: of the weight and memories of the past, the open-ended conflicts of the present, the projects and hopes of the future.”

[Franco Moretti, “The Moment of Truth.” New Left Review. Series I, number 159, September–October 1986. Pages 39-48.]

“Existentialism, like Marxism, addresses itself to experience in order to discover there concrete syntheses; it can conceive of these syntheses only within a moving, dialectical totalisation which is nothing else but history or—from the strictly cultural point of view which we have adopted here—‘philosophy-becoming-the world.’ For us, truth is something which becomes, it has and will have become. It is a totalisation which is forever being totalised. Particular facts do not signify anything; they are neither true nor false so long as they are not related, through the mediation of various partial totalities, to the totalisation in process. ” [Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Hazel Barnes, translator. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 1960.]

“I borrowed my materials from my own century: Marxism, pacifism, anti-fascism, etc.” [Jean-Paul Sartre. War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939-1940. Quintin Hoare, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1999. Page 80.]

“Our problem here is that of subjectivity in the context of Marxist philosophy. My aim is to establish with precision whether the principles and truths that constitute Marxism allow subjectivity to exist and have a function, or whether they reduce it to a set of facts that can be ignored in the dialectical study of human development. Taking [Georg] Lukács as an example, I hope to convince you that an erroneous interpretation of certain undoubtedly ambiguous Marxist texts can give rise to what I would call an ‘idealist dialectics’, which in practice ignores the subject, and to show how such a position may be damaging for the development of Marxist studies. My topic is not subject and object, but rather subjectivity, or subjectivation, and objectivity or objectivation. The subject is a different, far more complex problem. When I speak of subjectivity, it is as a certain type of internal action, an interior system—système en intériorité—rather than the simple, immediate relationship of the subject to itself.” [Jean-Paul Sartre, “Marxism and Subjectivity: The Rome Lecture, 1961.” New Left Review. Series II, number 88, July–August 2014. Pages 89-111.]

“The sole purpose of an absurd existence was indefinitely to produce works of art which at once escaped it. That was its sole justification; an imperfect justification, moreover, which did not succeed in redeeming those long gobs of time that had to be swallowed one after another. It was really a morality of salvation through art. As for life itself, this was to be lived in carefree fashion, any old way. I was doing so well at living it ‘any old way’ that I was getting into a rut: I was acquiring bachelor habits.” [Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Path to Rooted Freedom.” New Left Review. Series I, number 145, May–June 1984. Pages 39-55.]

“A universalist ideology and practice, born in the most highly industrialized parts of Europe and imported by revolutionary intellectual circles at the end of the nineteenth century into a country whose economic and geo-political structure would seem to define it, in the name of Marxism itself, as a peculiarity—in other words, as such a ‘backward’ nation that Marxist practice (the mobilization of the working masses, etc.) apparently could not develop there, at least without extensive modification.” [Jean-Paul Sartre, “Socialism in One Country.” New Left Review. Series I, number 100, November–December 1976. Pages 143-163.]

“I have said that we accept without reservation the thesis set forth by [Friedrich] Engels in his letter to [Karl] Marx: ‘Men themselves make their history but in a given environment which conditions them.’ However, this text is not one of the clearest, and it remains open to numerous interpretations. How are we to understand that man makes History if at the same time it is History which makes him? Idealist Marxism seems to have chosen the easiest interpretation: entirely determined by prior circumstances—that is, in the final analysis, by economic conditions—man is a passive product, a sum of conditioned reflexes. Being inserted in the social world amidst other equally conditioned inertias, this inert object, with the nature which it has received, contributes to precipitate or to check the ‘course of the world.’” [Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings. Stephen Priest, editor. Alan Sheridan Smith, translator. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Page 305.]

“What we propose here is a concrete liberalism. By that we mean that all persons who through their work collaborate toward the greatness of a country have the full rights of citizens of that country. What gives them this right is not the possession of a problematical and abstract ‘human nature,’ but their active participation in the life of the society. This means, then, that the Jews — and likewise the Arabs and the Negroes — from the moment that they are participants in the nation enterprise, have a right in that enterprise; they are citizens. But they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, Arabs — that is, as concrete persons.

“In societies where women vote, they are not asked change their sex when they enter the voting booth; the vote of a woman is worth just as much as that of a man, but it is as a woman that she votes, with her woman intuitions and concerns, in her full character of woman. When it is a question of the legal rights of the Jew, and of the more obscure but equally indispensable rights that are not inscribed in any code, he must enjoy those rights not as a potential Christian but precisely as a French Jew. It is with his character, his customs, his tastes, his religion if he has one, his name, and his physical traits that we must accept him. And if that acceptance is total and sincere, the result will be, first, to make easier the Jew’s choice of authenticity, and then, bit by bit, to make possible, without violence and by the very course of history, that assimilation to which some would like to drive him by force.

“But the concrete liberalism we have just described is a goal; it is in danger of becoming no more than a mere ideal if we do not determine upon the means to attain it. As we have shown, it cannot be a matter of acting on the Jew. The Jewish problem is born of anti-Semitism; thus it is anti- Semitism that we must suppress in order to resolve the problem. The question therefore comes back to this: What shall we do about anti-Semitism?”

[Jean-Paul Sartre. Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. George J. Becker, translator. New York: Schocken Books. 1976. Pages 105-106.]

“What is required is the construction of a relationship between men which guarantees not only freedom, but revolutionary freedom of thought – a relationship which enables men to appropriate knowledge completely and to criticize it. This, in any case, is how knowledge has always proceeded, but it is never how the ‘Marxism’ of Communist parties has proceeded. So that the creative culture of its members may grow and in order to enable them to acquire a maximum of true knowledge, the party – the political organization of the class – must make it possible for them to innovate and to engage in mutual argument, instead of presenting itself as the administrator of acquired knowledge.” [Jean-Paul Sartre. Between Existentialism and Marxism. John Matthews, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Page 134.]

“‘Men make their own History … but under circumstances … given and transmitted from the past.’ If this statement is true, then both determinism and analytical reason must be categorically rejected as the method and law of human history. Dialectical rationality, the whole of which is contained in this sentence, must be seen as the permanent and dialectical unity of freedom and necessity. In other words, as we have seen, the universe becomes a dream if the dialectic controls man from outside, as his unconditioned law. But if we imagine that every one simply follows his inclinations and that these molecular collisions produce large scale effects, we will discover average or statistical results, but not a historical deyelopment.” [Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Volume One. Alan Sheridan-Smith, translator. Jonathan Rée, editor. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2004. Page 35.]

“Jean-Paul Sartre … identifies [Karl] Marx’s humanism with the philosophy of action or freedom expressed in the youthful Theses on Feuerbach. Of special interest to Existentialists is Marx’s repudiation of the materialist doctrine which ‘forgets that it is men that change circumstances, and that the educator himself needs educating.‘ Sartre does not assign to man any permanent essence or human nature, but conceives of him as a ‘project.’ Man’s self, surpassing is precisely what he calls the condition of freedom. Socialism is merely instrumental to the reign of freedom, to a new type of humanism ‘above and beyond the rational organization of the community.’ This new revolutionary humanism differs from all past humanisms by its struggle to abolish classes, by its efforts to unite all men. Is it, then, beyond parties and classes? No, because it is open at first only to individuals in the situation of oppressed persons Through the agency of an oppressed class alone can it become manifest to the world.” [Donald Clark Hodges, “Marx’s Contribution to Humanism.” Science & Society. Volume 29, number 2, spring 1965. Pages 173-191.]

“… [Jean-Paul] Sartre, in his matured writings, takes a political stand raising voice for the oppressed people against the oppressors. This phase gives a kind of Marxist identity to Sartre and his existential-phenomenology is claimed to have merged to the Marxist ideals. The thesis defends Sartre’s position in this phase and incorporates the dialogue between Sartre’s existential phenomenology and Marxism. As a final turn of this interaction the thesis finally incorporates the ethical notes put forward by Sartre as a guiding principle to the Leftists keeping in view humanity as a whole. His ethical arguments are discussed with a comparative analysis with that of Emmanuel Levinas.” [Pallavi Sharma. Problem of the Other in Jean Paul Sartre’s Existential Phenomenology. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Indian Institute of Technology. Guwahati, Assam, India. June, 2015. Page x.]

“As the 1930’s saw an upsurge in intellectual interest in Marxism, it also saw that interest becoming increasingly attached to a Soviet interpretation. It might be helpful, therefore, to further elucidate [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s view on the dialectics of nature, since his position was first staked out during this period. While Sartre was rather non-political in his early career, it can be said that once he acquired a political outlook, his inclinations pointed him toward [Karl] Marx. Likewise, it can also be said that for his entire intellectual career he opposed the theory of the dialectics of nature.” [William L. Remley, “Sartre and Engels: The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Confrontation on the Dialectics of Nature.” Sartre Studies International. Volume 18, issue 2, 2012. Pages 19-48.]

“… I shall assume the ‘enrichment within continuity’ of [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s philosophical project as a whole, that is, from his existential phenomenological texts through to his Marxian dialectical works.…

According to my reconstruction of Sartre’s work as a whole, I distinguish: (a) three inter-related, although irreducible, discursive planes along which the theory is articulated, which are necessary in order to account for the complexity of ‘Being’ in general, ‘human reality’ and ‘world’; (b) two inter-related, irreducible planes of reality to which theoretical discourse applies.”

[Maria Antonietta Perna, “Spinozean Multitude: Radical Italian Thought vis-à-vis Sartrean Existential Marxism.” Sartre Studies International. Volume 13, number 1, June 2007. Pages 35-61.]

“In my own view, the political Subject, which Marxism really does have to theorize anew, never coincides with the subject-in-revolt, even though it presupposes its existence. The fact that the proletariat is active amongst the people is not to be confused with the fact that it is the masses who make History, which is always true. There is within the political subject, and within the process of a new type of political party, a principle of consistency, and it is neither seriality, fusion, the oath nor the institution. It is an irreducible that escapes [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s totalization of practical ensembles. It is a principle that is no longer based upon individual praxis.” [Alain Badiou. Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. David Macey, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2009. Page 34.]

“The concept ‘dialectical reason,’ as used by ‘marxist’ theorists, contains buried within it a number of theoretical problems, problems which have significance for where why and how we may use dialectical reason. There are three issues, in particular, on which reflective clarity is both always needed and often lacking. Firstly, what precisely distinguishes ‘dialectical reason’ from ‘analytical reason’? Secondly, how does one legitimise the use of dialectical reason – that is, are there ‘laws’ of dialectical reason, how are they discovered, and to what may they be applied? Thirdly, given that the central concept of dialectics is that of ‘totality,’ and that it is therefore assumed that the observer is always part of the totality being observed, how, if at all, does one escape from historical relativism?

“It is these problems that [Jean-Paul] Sartre is dealing with in The Critique of Dialectical Reason.”

[Richard Turner, “Dialectical Reason.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 4, spring 1973. Pages 30-33.]

“[Jean-Paul] Sartre is often quoted as saying that humans are ‘condemned to be free’ …. We are condemned to the kind of existence we have because we did not choose it and we cannot escape it, except by ceasing to exist altogether. This kind of existence includes freedom because the ways in which the world seems to us, the ways in which we think and feel about it, and the ways in which we behave in response to it are all ultimately manifestations of projects that we have chosen to pursue, that we need not have chosen, and that each of us can yet choose to change. Our characters are not simply given to us, on this view, but are things that we have freedom over. My essence is not my nature: ‘I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence’ and ‘beyond the motifs and mobiles of my act’ ….” [Jonathan Webber. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page 59.]

“Existentialist thought has not so much blown away as decomposed in order to fertilize various fields of thought. To argue for this proposition and, more generally, to examine what has become of existentialism in the 1980s, I think it useful to begin with a conceptual résumé of the philosophy. After distilling its themes and identifying several widespread misunderstandings about existentialism, we can proceed to survey the intellectual landscape to determine the movement’s current status.” [Alfie Kohn, “Existentialism Here and Now.” The Georgia Review. Volume 38, summer 1984. Pages 381-397.]

“The adventures of the dialectic, the most recent of which we have retraced here, are errors through which it must pass, since it is in principle a thought with several centers and several points of entry, and because it needs time to explore them all. With the name ‘culture,’ Max Weber identified the primary coherence of all histories. [Georg] Lukács believes it possible to enclose them all in a cycle which is closed when all meanings are found in a present reality, the proletariat. But this historical fact salvages universal history only because it was first ‘prepared’ by philosophical consciousness and because it is the emblem of negativity. Thence comes the reproach of idealism that is made against Lukács; and the proletariat and revolutionary society as he conceives them are indeed ideas without historical equivalents. But what remains of the dialectic if one must give up reading history and deciphering in it the becoming-true of society? Nothing of it is left in [Jean-Paul] Sartre. He holds as utopian this continued intuition which was to be confirmed every day by the development of action and of revolutionary society and even by a true knowledge of past history. To dialectical philosophy, to the truth that is glimpsed behind irreconcilable choices, he opposes the demand of an intuitive philosophy which wants to see all meanings immediately and simultaneously. There is no longer any ordered passage from one perspective to another, no completion of others in me and of me in others, for this is possible only in time, and an intuitive philosophy poses everything in the instant: the Other thus can be present to the I only as its pure negation.” [Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Adventures of the Dialectic. Joseph Bien, translator. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 1973. Pages 204-205.]

“In an epilogue [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty espouses a ‘middle way;’ which fights against capitalism for the freedom of the proletariat, and the same time, resists communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book is not for beginners; it presupposes a familiarity with Marxist literature and an under standing of the historic struggle between Party and proletariat. However, those who are in a position to appreciate its questions cannot but judge Adventures itself to be an important new chapter in the dialectic.” [S. L. W., “Adventures of the Dialectic.” Review article. The Review of Metaphysics. Volume 27, number 4, June 1974. Page 804.]

“Today one finally has the right and even the duty to be, above all things, a revolutionary doctor, that is to say a man who utilizes the technical knowledge of his profession in the service of the revolution and the people. But now old questions reappear: How does one actually carry out a work of social welfare? How does one unite individual endeavor with the needs of society?

“We must review again each of our lives, what we did and thought as doctors, or in any function of public health before the revolution. We must do this with profound critical zeal and arrive finally at the conclusion that almost everything we thought and felt in that past period ought to be deposited in an archive, and a new type of human being created. If each one of us expends his maximum effort towards the perfection of that new human type, it will be much easier for the people to create him and let him be the example of the new Cuba.”

[Che Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 56, issue 8, January 2005. Pages 40-48.]

“A guiding principle of the critical theory of postcommunism could be that any theoretical disenchantment is a function of the historical conditions that made it possible. For instance, the study of postcommunism brings to light a series of coincidences between neoconservative and certain leftist positions: the adoption of formulas such as ‘the failure of the Left,’ the rebuttal of feminism and multiculturalism, disdain for the ‘American university Left,’ a certain view on the decadence of true values, the rejection of analytical Marxism, the monologic discourse on ‘modernity,’ a resistance to plural ontologies and alternative epistemologies, and last but not least, a devaluation of the role of activism and/or militantism for theory itself.” [Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, “Towards a critical theory of postcommunism?: Beyond anticommunism in Romania.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 159. January/February 2010. Pages 26-32.]

“The postcommunist transition has been characterized in Eastern Europe by the return and rearticulation of capitalism and coloniality in this region of the world. Seen from Eastern Europe, the postcommunist transition can be understood as the top-to-bottom integration of East European governmentalities into the political (European Union), security (North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Frontex), and economic orders (International Monetary Fund, World Bank) of Western governmentalities, at the cost of the general population, and with the open support of the Eurocentric intellectual and formal civil society, including most of the former anticommunist dissidents. In so far as Romania is concerned, the depression of the late 1980s was followed — without any period of recovery — by the catastrophic depression of the 1990s, when poverty and social insecurity reached levels unheard of since World War Two.” [Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, “Decolonial AestheSis in Eastern Europe: Potential Paths of Liberation.” Social Text. July 15th, 2013. Retrieved on August 22nd, 2016.]

“At the end of The Culture of Narcissism he [Christopher Lasch] calls, in a rare moment of optimism of the will, for the creation by citizens of ‘communities of competence’ and refers to ‘traditions of localism, self-help, and community action that only need the vision of a new society, a decent society, to give them new vigour.’ The call, however, is too little and too late. His whole analysis of family and state rests on a reactionary defence of the bourgeois, patriarchal, Christian form of the family, which leads to a distorted and exaggerated account of historical change. Furthermore it is an analysis so shot-through with individualism that the ‘vision’ of a new society so unconvincingly evoked at the last moment can inspire little confidence.” [Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, “Narcissism and the Family: a Critique of Lasch.” New Left Review. Series I, number 135, September–October 1982. Pages 35-48.]

“In order to break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution of their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own ‘communities of competence.’ Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead.” [Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1979. Page 235.]

“This essay concerns the significance of ‘human sensuous activity’—what has become known variously as ‘praxis’ to many Marxists and ‘action’ to analytic and phenomenological philosophers. Put grandly, our thesis is that it is from labour, and not from language or thought, that the category of meaning arises. That is to say that a logically necessary foundation for agreement in what people say and mean is to be found in what they do—interpreted in a broad and not specifically economic sense which we shall clarify. Our subject matter can be described from a Marxist perspective as the division of manual from mental labour. However, we shall be discussing this division in ontological rather than historical terms.” [Len Doyal and Roger Harris, “The Practical Foundations of Human Understanding.” New Left Review. Series I, number 139, May–June 1983. Pages 59-78.]

“Successful agitation leads to the supersession of one agitational programme by another. Hence at one time it can be the demand for bread, at another the slogan ‘All power to the soviets,’ and at another the programme of the first congress of the Communist International. Clearly the only kind of structure which could be of use to practical or revolutionary marxism in its task of transforming reality, is not one in which practice has been divorced from theory, in which the uncovering of truth ‘all takes place within knowledge.’ On the contrary, this would be to turn marxism into the new scholasticism rather than a living science.” [Peter Binns, “The Marxist theory of Truth.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 4, spring 1973. Pages 3-9.]

“Besides the conscious-shy types there is another type that eschews the scientific study of consciousness. I call this second type the ‘new mysterians,’ after a forgettable 1960s pop group called Question Mark and the Mysterians. The new mysterious think that consciousness will never be understood. Whether its causal role is significant or not, it will not be understood. The old mysterians were dualists who thought that consciousness could not be understood because it operates according to nonnatural principles and has nonnatural properties. The new mysterious are naturalists. They believe that mind and consciousness exist and that they operate in accordance with natural principles and are comprised of natural properties, But the new mysterious are a postmodern group, naturalists with a kinky twist. They are trying to drive a railroad spike through the heart of scientism, the view that science will eventually explain whatever is natural. Thomas Nagel was the founder of this group. In his famous paper ‘What Is It like to Be a Bat?’ Nagel argued that there can be no remotely plausible naturalistic account of consciousness, that something essential will always be left out of even our very best theory.” [Owen Flanagan. The Science of the Mind. Second revised and expanded edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1991. Page 313.]

“… the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.” [Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review. Volume 83, number 4, October 1974. Pages 435-450.]

“First-person phenomenal consciousness cannot, even in principle, be captured in the sort of third-person objective description that normal science relishes.

“There is something right about this point, although it is implausibly used by many philosophers— the ones I dubbed ‘Mysterians’ a decade ago— to argue that although the mind is a natural phenomenon we humans are not smart enough to ever grasp or make intelligible its nature. Why’s that? Because we have no conceptual resources, nor are they in the offing, to comprehend a phenomenon as both subjective and objective. Certain scientistic types, some reductionists and eliminativists, inadvertently encourage mysterianism by seeming to suggest that subjective experience, once seen for what it is, disappears— it is reduced to something else, say the activity of cell assemblies, or eliminated, the way ‘phlogiston’ was eliminated as an explanation of heat exchange.”

[Owen Flanagan. The Problem Of The Soul: Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them. New York: Basic Books imprint of the Perseus Books Group. 2002. Page 88.]

“The ‘mysterianism’ I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth – an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history – as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.– [Colin McGinn, “All machine and no ghost?: The more we look at the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness. Perhaps philosophers will never be able to solve the mystery.” New Statesman. February 20th, 2012. Pages 40-43.]

“There is no denying that the ‘mysterian’ position is pessimistic about our ability to answer every question about nature that we can pose. Am I saying that all is futile and we should go and tend our garden? No, my position is not purely negative …. There are ten points that should serve to make what I am saying more palatable, even liberating.…

1. “… there is plenty of interesting and important work to be done on the neurophysiology of the mind.
2. “If we acknowledge that the source of the mystery lies in the structure of human intelligence, then we can avoid being drawn into religious mysticism about consciousness.…
3. “Knowledge is generally a good thing, but it is not self-evident that complete knowledge of ourselves would leave us better off.…
4. “If consciousness proves permanently enigmatic, a marvel of nature that we cannot explain, then we can retain our sense of awe about the universe.…
5. “It is salutary to curb the scientific hubris that has dominated our culture during this century.…
6. “… I would very much like to know what it is like to be a bat, but I am not willing to become a bat to satisfy my curiosity.
7. “Nothing I have said precludes us from pursuing successful phenomenology, that is, the systematic description and classification of consciousness per se.…
8. “Sometimes there is virtue in simply accepting one’s limitations and not trying to pretend that one has not limitations.…
9. “… The weakness of the mind in one area is typically a side-effect of its strength in another area.…
10. “A whole new field of investigation now opens up: the study of our cognitive strengths and weaknesses.”

“My subject is the secular philosophical responses to this impulse. I will (somewhat arbitrarily) call the question to which it seeks an answer the cosmic question. It is a question to which a religion could provide an answer, if one accepted it, but my discussion will concentrate on nonreligious responses. The question, again, is this: How can one bring into one’s individual life a full recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole? It is this quite general question, rather than the more specific search for redemption, that I will focus on.

“The secular responses fall into three categories: (a) those that reject the question; (b) those that construct an answer from the inside out, that is, starting from the human point of view; and (c) those that construct an answer from the outside in, that is, starting from a cosmic point of view.”

[Thomas Nagel. Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Page 17.]

“… it is essential to recall that much of the practical employment of reason is in the service of lower functions. Is this a proper exercise of that faculty, or does it have a point beyond the uses of cleverness, prudence, and courage, beyond the rational calculation of the most sensible way to spend one’s time and money, or to organize society? This question prompts Aristotle to pass from the vague characterization that human life, as opposed to other life, is rational, to a consideration of the objects best suited for the exercise of this capacity.” [Thomas Nagel, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia.” Phronesis. Volume 17, number 3, 1972. Pages 252-259]

“Many things happen in our bodies and our minds we do not have introspective access. With suitable training the range of our nonobservational, introspective awareness can be extended, but we are very complicated organisms, too complicated to oversee every detail of our own operation. Fortunately an enormous amount of what we and our bodies do does not require attention and is the result of minimal learning or none at all.” [Thomas Nagel, “The Boundaries of Inner Space.” The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 66, number 14, June 1969. Pages 452-458.]

“Everyone knows that something has gone wrong, in the United States, with the conventions of privacy. Along with a vastly increased tolerance for variation in sexual life we have seen a sharp increase in prurient and censorious attention to the sexual lives of public figures and famous persons, past and present. The culture seems to be growing more tolerant and more intolerant at the same time, though perhaps different parts of it are involved in the two movements.” [Thomas Nagel, “Concealment and Exposure.” Philosophy & Public Affairs. Volume 27, number 1, winter 1998. Pages 3-30.]

“An instrumentally justified principle for identifying fair procedures is very different, as a moral conception, from the deontological idea that some features of a process can legitimize or delegitimize the outcome in themselves, whereas others cannot. The case is analogous, and closely related, to that of a substitution of a purely instrumental criterion of responsibility and desert for a retributive one in the domain of punishment. There too one starts from the idea that people are responsible for causing harm to others, and deserve punishment for it, in the absence of a specific set of excusing conditions.” [Thomas Nagel, “Justice and Nature.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Volume 17, number 2, summer 1997. Pages 303-321.]

“… I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won’t go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails—simply in virtue of our mental concepts—that the system is conscious.” [Thomas Nagel, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.” Philosophy. Volume 73, number 285, July 1998. Pages 337-352.]

“We do not live in a just world. This may be the least controversial claim one could make in political theory. But it is much less clear what, if anything, justice on a world scale might mean, or what the hope for justice should lead us to want in the domain of international or global institutions, and in the policies of states that are in a position to affect the world order.” [Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice.” Philosophy & Public Affairs. Volume 33, number 2, spring 2005. Pages 113-147.]

“I was once at an international seminar devoted substantially to the dis- cussion of individual rights, their moral basis, their boundaries, and their relation to other values, moral and political—the aim being to present recent developments in American political theory to interested parties from elsewhere. The Americans in the group were much concerned over such issues as freedom of expression for racists, access to pornography, affirmative action for women and minorities, and restrictions on abortion. After listening for a while to the admirably subtle discussion of these issues, some of the other participants began to grumble. They pointed out that in the countries they came from, there were no free elections, no free press, no protection against imprisonment or execution without trial or against torture by the police, no freedom of religion—or that their countries were threatened by radical religious move- ments which would quickly abolish such freedoms if they came to power. Why were we not talking about those things rather than these ridiculous issues of detail, which were of no concern to them?” [Thomas Nagel, “Personal Rights and Public Space.” Philosophy & Public Affairs. Volume 24, number 2, spring 1995. Pages 83-107.]

“… there is much to be said about the instrumental value and disvalue of equality; the question of its intrinsic value does not arise in isolation. Yet the answer to that question determines what instrumental costs are acceptable. If equality is in itself good, producing it may be worth a certain amount of inefficiency and loss of liberty.” [Thomas Nagel, “The Justification of Equality.” Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía. Volume 10, number 28, April 1978. Pages 3-31.]

“The justice of institutions depends on their conformity to two principles. The first requires the greatest equal liberty compatible with a like liberty for all. The second (the difference principle) permits only those inequalities in the distribution of primary economic and social advantages that benefit everyone, in particular the worst off. Liberty is prior in the sense that it cannot be sacrificed for economic and social advantages, unless they are so scarce or unequal as to prevent the meaningful exercise of equal liberty until material conditions have improved.” [Thomas Nagel, “Rawls on Justice.” The Philosophical Review. Volume 82, number 2, April 1973. Pages 220-234.]

“… race is an independent and even more intractable cause of the failure of fair equality of opportunity in our society. Because of slavery, followed by a century of legally enforced segregation and economic oppression, and because of their physical identifiability and the continuing prejudices of other members of the society that single them out, blacks form a hereditary group whose members inherit a generic social disadvantage.” [Thomas Nagel, “John Rawls and Affirmative Action.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Number 39, spring 2003. Pages 82-84.]

“I believe that the division of standpoints within the individual is a permanent feature of the situation with which any realistic political theory must deal. The balance may be shifted, and various sorts of leverage may change the direction of the overall result, but the coexistence of personal and impersonal will remain, and they will always remain to some extent in competition.” [Thomas Nagel, “What Makes a Political Theory Utopian?” Social Research. Volume 56, number 4, winter 1989. Pages 903-920.]

“From the apathetic reaction to atrocities committed in Vietnam by the United States and its allies, one may conclude that moral restrictions on the conduct of war command almost as little sympathy among the general public as they do among those charged with the formation of U.S. military policy. Even when restrictions on the conduct of warfare are defended, it is usually on legal grounds alone: their moral basis is often poorly understood. I wish to argue that certain restrictions are neither arbitrary nor merely conventional, and that their validity does not depend simply on their usefulness. There is, in other words, a moral basis for the rules of war, even though the conventions now officially in force are far from giving it perfect expression.” [Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre.” Philosophy & Public Affairs. Volume 1, number 2, winter 1972. Pages 123-144.]

“The concept of a person might possibly survive an application to cases which require us to speak of two or more persons in one body, but it seems strongly committed to some form of whole number countability. Since even this seems open to doubt, it is possible that the ordinary, simple idea of a single person will come to seem quaint some day, when the complexities of the human control system become clearer and we become less certain that there is anything very important that we are one of. But it is also possible that we shall be unable to abandon the idea no matter what we discover.” [Thomas Nagel, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness.” Synthese. Volume 22, number 3/4, May 1971. Pages 396-413.]

“It is the purpose of this paper to examine the reasons for believing that physicalism cannot possibly be true. I mean by physicalism the thesis that a person, with all his psychological attributes, is nothing over and above his body, with all its physical attributes. The various theories which make this claim may be classified according to the identities which they allege between the mental and the physical. These identities may be illustrated by the standard example of a quart of water which is identical with a collection of molecules, each containing two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.” [Thomas Nagel, “Physicalism.” The Philosophical Review. Volume 74, number 3, July 1965. Pages 339-356.]

“Dreams … are not mere memory phenomena. It is a mistake to invest the demonstration that is it impossible to have experiences while asleep with more import than it has. It is an observation about our use of the word ‘experience,’ and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. True, we cannot have experiences while asleep. But we can have dreams.” [Thomas Nagel, “Dreaming.” Analysis. Volume 19, number 5, April 1959. Pages 112-116.]

“One would like [Thomas] Nagel to spell out more clearly why he dismisses theism as an answer to the cosmic question and, in so doing, engage some more sophisticated modern conceptions of theism, such as found in neoclassical metaphysics and process thought. Such modern theistic alternatives, for instance, would offer public discourse a more holistic conception of the world, which Nagel rightly seeks, without resorting to various forms of supernaturalism. All this notwithstanding, Nagel’s discussion of religion in the book makes a significant contribution for at least four reasons. First, his ‘religious temperament’ is both insightful and constructive. Second, his formulation of the ‘cosmic question’ is both existentially and metaphysically right on point. Third, his articulation of the various secular responses to the cosmic question offers a clear and nuanced map of the non-theistic philosophical alternatives. And, fourth, his trenchant critique of the reductionistic and anti-teleological tendencies of modern philosophy and science offers a valuable additional voice, indeed a secular voice, to the cultural debate over our understanding of the universe and our place within it.” [William Meyer, “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008.” Review article. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Volume 70, number 3, December 2011. Pages 251-253.]

“The realm of the videotic covers all spheres of human, and non-human, activity and extends to the unconscious, which we now know is structured like a video-tape. (Often badly worn and likely to play erratically through constant repetition and sudden fast-forward and reverse moves.) The role of the unconscious in the master-tape of history, a history of difference rendered intelligible through man’s technological development, remains under-theorised in the web of power relations which record history through man. In this analysis we can see the state as the plane of relations on which the master-tape is constructed and from which class copies are run to be distributed through the system we know as I.V.A.s. (Individual Videological Apparatuses).” [Richard Osborne, “Towards a Theory of Videotics.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 36, spring 1984. Pages 27-28.]

“The dogmatics of the True Conservative is ‘systematic and reasonable’; yet it cannot be presented as such because ‘the essence’ of conservatism ‘is inarticulate.’ To this contradiction is immediately added another: that in spite of its inarticulateness it is ‘capable of expression.’ Ah, but the contradictions resolve themselves at a higher level. Reading the True Conservative’s testament we find that he expresses himself mostly through allusions, images and examples, which allows a good deal of vagueness and imprecision into his discourse. Though ‘it is of the nature of conservatism to avoid abstractions,’ in fact it rarely descends from them, not even when offering an example, as it does not show how the example relates to the abstractions.” [Andrew Belsey, “The Real Meaning of Conservatism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 28, summer 1981. Pages 1-5.]

“Geopolitical ideology was later appropriated by [Adolf] Hitler and [Benito] Mussolini and by the Japanese militarists to explain and to justify their expansionist behavior. And it was this expansionist behavior—which threatened the geopolitical interest of the opposing powers—that led to the Second World War, not the internal politics of Germany, Italy, or Japan.

“This ideology disappeared to some degree during the Cold War in favor of a model of ideological competition. That is to say, geopolitical ideology appeared inconsistent with the high-minded justifications (in which ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ largely figured) given for interventions in the third world.”

[Michael Klare, “The New Geopolitics.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 55, issue 3, July 2003. Pages 51-56.]

“My purpose here is to encourage and to contribute to a revival of political philosophy. I am not alone in working to that end. Our numbers are, no doubt, small, but they have been increasing for some time, although it must be admitted that there is as yet little enthusiasm for the task. What surprises me is that most of those who ought to be best-equipped to undertake it because of their intellectual temperament, which inclines them to break with dogmatic beliefs, because of their philosophical culture, because of their desire to find some meaning behind the events, confused as they may be, that take place in our world, who might be expected to have become sufficiently disenchanted with the rival dominant ideologies to want to discern the preconditions for the development of freedom, or at last to shed some light on the obstacles that stand in its way, are and remain stubbornly blind to the political. ‘Freedom,’ the simple word I have just used, is usually banished from scientific language or relegated to the vernacular, when, that is, it does not become a slogan for small groups of intellectuals who declare that they have taken sides and who are content with anticommunism. They can be ignored. no matter how much noise they make, as we have seen their kind before. I am more concerned with those intellectuals and philosophers who claim to belong to the left or the far left. Although they live in an era in which a new form of society has emerged under the banner of fascism on the one hand and under that of socialism on the other, they refuse to contemplate or even perceive that momentous event. In order to do so, they would of course have to give new meaning to the idea of freedom. And yet they abandon it to the vagaries of public opinion, apparently on the grounds that everyone defines it in accordance with their own wishes or interests. By doing so. they cut themselves off, not from public opinion, but from political philosophy. even though they claim to be in search of rigorous knowledge. For the sole motivation behind political philosophy has always been a desire to escape the servitude of collective beliefs and to win the freedom to think about freedom in society; it has always borne in mind the essential difference between the regime of freedom and despotism. or indeed tyranny. Yet now that we are faced with the rise of a new type of despotism (which differs, let it be noted, from ancient despotism as much as modern democracy differs from classical democracy), of a despotism which has, moreover. world-wide ambitions, despotism itself is becoming invisible.” [Claude Lefort. Democracy and Political Theory. David Macey, translator. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. 1988. Pages 9-10.]

“The categories of productive and unproductive labour have been a source of contention among Marxist scholars since [Karl] Marx first committed them to paper. This article will offer a critique of both the orthodox and autonomist approaches to this issue, arguing that they constitute transhistorical and analytically inadequate interpretations. In contrast, a social form approach to productive and unproductive labour provides a substantive definition of these categories in relation to the commodity form, and brings class struggle back to the forefront in a theoretically consistent manner.…

“… this article puts forward a social form approach to PUPL [productive and unproductive labour], whereby the commodity is understood as the mode of existence of productive labour. This implies, first, that PUPL must be understood as relational categories of practice that may correspond sociologically to certain real individual workers, but are not in themselves sociological categories: and second, that no concrete labour, regardless of its sensuous qualities, can be a priori judged productive or unproductive – but rather, any labour can be productive depending on whether its product is expressed as an exchange-value. This indeterminacy means that the final arbiter in the real configuration of PUPL in any given society is the historical development of the class struggle, particularly the dynamics of commodification and decommodification of labour’s product. Thus, PUPL are inherently categories of struggle, reflecting as they do capital’s attempt to impose the commodity form as the only expression of social worth, and labour’s counterposed struggle to assert its needs at any ‘cost.’”

[Alexis B. Moraitis and Jack Copley, “Productive and unproductive labour and social form: Putting class struggle in its place.” Capital & Class. Volume 41, number 1, 2017. Pages 91-114.]

“… recalcitrant emotions constitute a vital source of self-knowledge which, in turn, may contribute to … emancipation from the oppressive basal frameworks. Sincerity is, thus, an important virtue of self-knowledge.…

“… the normative and emancipatory aspect of authenticity has been important for existentialists and feminists.…

“… outlaw emotions may give rise to a conscious insight into the sexist, racist, and other oppressive frameworks and thus pave way to emancipation from those frameworks.…

“… the overall project of emancipation, whether sexual, racial, or political, requires a regulative ideal for the emotions of emancipated selves as well.”

[Mikko Salmela, “What Is Emotional Authenticity?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 35, issue 3, 2005. Pages 209-230.]

“From the perspective taken in this book, natural caring is the motivating force behind ethical caring. When something goes wrong (or might go wrong) in our relational encounters, we want to restore or maintain natural caring. To do this, we draw on what I have called our ‘ethical ideal,’ our memories of caring and being cared for. We ask how we might act if this other were not so difficult, if the situation were less complicated, if the burdens were not so great, if we were at our caring best. And through this often challenging process of reflection, we decide what to do, how to respond.

“Ethical caring, then, derives its strength from natural caring. This is clearly a reversal of Kantian priorities. Ethical caring does not seek moral credit; it seeks a response from the cared-for that completes the encounter—a recognition that is usually spontaneously offered in natural caring. Natural caring is the cherished condition; ethical caring seeks to restore or replace natural caring.”

[Nel Noddings. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Second edition. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2013. Page xvi.]

“[Nel] Noddings’s ethics of caring is not typically characterized by her ontological analysis of a relational self. Only through scattered statements does it become clear that she defines humans as ontologically related to others.… This naturalistic account of the self, however, does not provide a clear deliberation on how exactly human relations constituted the self. Since the notion of a related self is the condition for a new ethics, an analysis of the soundness and insightfulness of the self as the foundation for a new ethics is difficult. Nevertheless, throughout her exposition of the ethics of caring, it seems clear that mother and mothering is the model self and relation on which she bases her ethics.” [Guoping Zhao, “Relational Self, Nel Noddings’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics, and Education.” Philosophy of Education. 2011. Pages 238-244.]

“I have argued above that the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] standards process fits [Jürgen] Habermas’s conditions for the best practical discourse extraordinarily well [in his theory of communicative action]. If the IETF is an example of the discourse principle in action, then critical theory suggests that it sets a standard against which other rulemaking processes should be compared. Although in principle there is no reason why the comparison would not be apt for any rulemaking process, it seems particularly appropriate to begin by focusing on the rulemaking processes that are most similar to the IETF itself, that is, other Internet-based standards processes concerned with making rules that govern how the Internet itself functions. Although the IETF is the leading standards body for the Internet, many formal and informal Internet standards do originate elsewhere.” [A. Michael Froomkin, “Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace.” Harvard Law Review. Volume 16, number 3, January 2003. Pages 749-873.]

“… it is not a matter of news media, as independent variable, affecting the cognitive processes and behaviours of political elites. Nor is it simply a matter of political elites adapting their thinking and behaviour to accommodate the requirements of journalists and news production. Instead, journalists and politicians regularly have some form of combined role in the identification and selection of issues and their solutions. How that combined role is utilised in agenda-setting, from the point of view of politicians, is something rarely explored in research.

“The study presented here is ‘audience-centred’ and is conceived along these latter lines of ‘mediation’ and ‘social interactionism.’ Its starting assumptions are that: politicians consume and make extensive use of news in their daily information gathering and cognitive processes; politicians also have regular interactions with journalists in the course of their work and this also affects their thinking and behaviour. Consequently, journalism and journalists are likely to play a part in the construction of political agendas and political deliberations generally. The study is based on a set of 40 semistructured interviews with MPs [members of the UK Parliament]. It also draws on 12 interviews, with parliamentary officials and members of the House of Lords (all former MPs), and two related sets of interviews with political journalists and political support staff.”

[Aeron Davis. The Mediation of Power: A critical introduction. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 100.]

“As countless authors have shown, the story of a dominant ‘Western’ history is one of battles won and lost, the lives of great men, and the inevitability, if not grandeur, of war. However, archives of the modernist era provide a counter-narrative of movements and people who worked rigorously for peace and equality during times of war, who argue that war is a choice, not a necessity of existence. It was a time of avid mobilization, but it also marked a flourishing pacifist global momentum, with the peace movement in Britain hitting its apex in the 1930s, women’s movements against fascism and war organizing internationally, the Harlem Renaissance fighting racism in the United States, and the Indian National Congress non-violently protesting British Imperialism. The international organization for peace is a counter-narrative that has been consistently, and the feminist critic suspects systematically, written out of the dominant story of Western history, and can be reconstructed and retraced through the recovery of … the ‘peace archive.’ Including students in this mission, introducing them to radical archives of what has elsewhere been called ‘pacifisms past,’ radicalizes the classroom and allows undergraduates to become critical contributors to constructing counter-narratives of peace.” [J. Ashley Foster, Sarah M. Horowitz, and Laurie Allen, “Changing the Subject: Archives, Technology, and Radical Counter-Narratives of Peace.” Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching. Number 105, summer 2016. Pages 11-21.]

“With reference to Snapchat, I argue that the ephemeral characteristic of its technology applies an oral paradigm on highly visualized contents. Although online discourse of computer-mediated communication (CMC) shares many qualities with oral communication, the case of ephemeral applications is unique, as the oral features are already integrated in the application technology design and as orality is often implemented on highly visual products. Thus, it seems highly symbolic that one of Snapchat’s most popular features—selfie face-detection technology that enables adding real-time graphic effects—concentrates on the mouth. The dog Snapchat lens, for example, is activated when the user opens his or her mouth while taking a selfie, at which point a dog’s tongue comes out of the user’s mouth and licks the screen.” [Oren Soffer, “The Oral Paradigm and Snapchat.” Social Media + Society. July–September 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 1-5.]

“… radical philosophers must take as their starting point the current problems facing the working class. [Antonio] Gramsci correctly saw the only organ through which this could be achieved as the revolutionary party. It is the place where the experience of the class is generalized. It is the ‘crucible where the unification of theory and practice understood as a real historical process, takes place.’” [Peter Binns, “Beginning from Commitment.“ Symposium: What is Radical Philosophy? Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 3, winter 1972. Page 26.]

“The radical philosophers … say that the traditionalists who have a stranglehold on the universities are simply occupying themselves with trivilialities and refusing to do what they ought to do. They just state that there is one ‘correct’ procedure for philosophers, and this is the procedure which will lead to a revolution of values. They, on their side, resent the fact that there are so many people called philosophers who are doing nothing at all according to this correct procedure.” [Mary Warnock, “Marxist Course.” Symposium: What is Radical Philosophy? Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 3, winter 1972. Page 27-28.]

“… there is surely something new and exciting about the Radical Phllosophy movement. For the first time, the critics of orthodox philosophy are not isolated individuals but an organized group. The group is, as Jerry Cohen said to me only ‘a loose coalition of different tendencies and views which share a sense of alienation from the predominant modes of philosophical theory and practice in this country.‘ But there is the chance that a few philosophers, their isolation removed and their confidence strengthened, may now be encouraged to do something really constructive. It is time for another revolution in British philosophy, and I think the Radical Philosophy movement will act as a powerful catalyst.” [Benjamin Gibbs, “Academic Philosophy and Radical Philosophy.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 1, spring 1972. Page 5.]

“Contemporary British philosophy is at a dead end. Its academic practitioners have all but abandoned the attempt to understand the world, let alone to change it. They have made philosophy into a narrow and specialised academic subject of little relevance or interest to anyone outside the small circle of Professional Philosophers.

“Many students and teachers are now dissatisfied with this state of affairs, but so far they have been isolated. The result has been that serious philosophical work outside the conventional sphere has been minimal.

“The Radical Philosophy Group has been set up to challenge this situation, by people within philosophy departments and in other fields of work. We aim to question the institutional divisions which have so impoverished philosophy: for example, the divisions between academic departments which have cut philosophers off from the important philosophical work already being done by psychologists, sociologists and others; the division between students and teachers which has divorced academic philosophy from the radical activity and ideas of students; and, above all, the divisions which have isolated the universities and other educational institutions from the wider society, thereby narrowing the horizons of philosophical concern.”

[Editors, “Founding Statement.” Editorial. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 1, spring 1972. Frontispiece.]

“What, then, of the idea of a radical philosophy? The title of this conference – ‘30 Years of Radical Politics and Philosophy’ – conjugates ‘philosophy’ with ‘radical politics,’ studiously avoiding the more tricky term ‘radical philosophy’, and not just for reasons of modesty, or to avoid confusion with the history of the journal.” [Peter Osborne, “Radicalism and philosophy.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 103, Septenber/October 2000. Pages 6-11.]

“This 200ᵗʰ issue will be the final issue of the current print edition of Radical Philosophy, which has retained the same basic format since the introduction of the Commentary section back in 1994.…

“Radical Philosophy plans to announce details of its next instantiation to its subscribers and other readers early in 2017.”

[Peter Osborne, “Editorial: Political physics.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 200, November/December 2016. Page 2.]

“… many radicals are resigning from Boards of Studies across Britain, since their presence there simply served to legitimize forms which they could not change. Again, someone else suggested that Radical Philosophy should involve itself more with radical political groups. The Claimants Union was mentioned as an example. But do you teach people merely how to receive maximum goodies from the bourgeois state, or do you use it to expose the limits of the bourgeois state, and therefore teach people not to depend on and fetishize the State as an omnipotent and eternal form on which they depend? In the absence of a coherent theory, situated in the debates that have occupied Marxists (or maybe even Anarchists) for a hundred and some years, I really don’t see that Radical Philosophy qua Radical Philosophy will lead people to take the objectively right decisions whatever their intentions.” [David-Hillel Ruben, “The Politics of Radical Philosophy.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 4, spring 1973. Pages 34-37.]

“What if we … in our capacity as academics, authors, writers, thinkers and scholars want to resist the continued imposition of a neoliberal political rationality that may appear dead on its feet but is still managing to blunder on? …

“… what is interesting is the potential pirate philosophy contains for the development of a new kind of economy and society: one based far less on individualism, possession, acquisition, accumulation, competition, celebrity, and ideas of knowledge, research and thought as something to be owned, commodified, communicated, disseminated and exchanged as the property of single, indivisible authors (who, as Andrew Ross notes, are often likely to be corporate entities).”

[Gary Hall, “Pirate Radical Philosophy.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 173, May/June 2012. Pages 33-40.]

“Plato and Aristotle argued long ago that wonderment inspires philosophical refection, but with radical philosophy it is something akin to anger, disobedience, and resistance that cultivates a desire for knowledge that can help us in a fight. ‘Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future,’ writes Audre Lorde, ‘is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.’ It is in this spirit that I write this introduction to a group of radical philosophies engaged in acts of self-clarification within practical struggles.

“Radical philosophical projects often disorient those unaccustomed to them, because they challenge disciplinary boundaries and the merely contemplative notion of philosophy itself. The explanations and organization of this text are intended to be helpful to readers coming to it for different reasons and with various interests, and my discussions are mostly limited to the United States and its colonial history. My own interest in writing this book arises from the conviction that there are underappreciated commonalities among various critical social theories and social movements that when recognized are both insightful and empowering.”

[Chad Kautzer. Radical Philosophy: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 1-2.]

“Despite … indications of new possibilities for spontaneous action, traditional concerns about the ethical costs involved have not necessarily disappeared. Indeed, it is telling that two classic statements of spontaneity, those of Frantz Fanon and George [sic; Georges] Sorel, are extreme endorsements of revolutionary violence. In this regard, it seems like an opportune moment to revaluate the place of spontaneity in radical politics, specifically in terms of its relationship with violence. My argument is that spontaneity has fundamentally paradoxical implications for radical politics: while it does help address the violence of representation inside a movement, it does so at the expense of any clear ethical criterion for the nature of violence permissible against those outside the movement. I will make this argument by drawing connections between more Marxian discussions of spontaneity, Fanon and Sorel in particular, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s more ‘postmodern’ take on it.” [Devin Penner, “The Paradox of Spontaneity: Representation, Revolution and Violence in 20ᵗʰ Century Radical Theory.” Problematique. Issue 11, spring 2007. Pages 16-31.]

“We contend that growing numbers of today’s young people exhibit forms of identity and behaviour indicative of instrumental adaptation rather than creative resistance to underlying social, economic and cultural change. Looking at the data gathered so far here and in our wider ethno graphic project …, it is entirely reasonable to suggest that the ability of Western societies to maintain a minimum degree of social cohesion will become a matter of growing significance in the coming years. ‘Youth identity’ numbers amongst a broad range of social phenomena that register the breakdown of the modernist industrial order without necessarily indicating what stable forms might be replacing it or waiting in the wings. Will the next phase of capitalist social history be a Utopia of burgeoning personal freedom, trickle-down economics and universal prosperity or a bleaker dystopian world of atomization and deepening divisions driven into hitherto unknown territory by the remorseless economic logic of global consumer capitalism?” [Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, “Living for the weekend: Youth identities in northeast England.” Ethnography. Volume 10, number 1, March 2009. Pages 91-113.]

“The Production of Morality: the Vanishing Hand

“Morality rests on and reinforces human isolation. social virtue is a means of avoiding a guilty conscience – the earthly wages of sin. The production of this conscientiousness, in turn, is the specific function of the family and the school, as well as the old mother church. Parents and teachers are the judges of ‘acts’ and the administrators of rewards for goodness and punishments for naughtiness – the conscience and the whole servile habit surrounding it is their introjected shadow.…

“… [Karl] Marx could scorn morality yet assail the evils of capitalism.”

[Tony Skillen, “Marxism and Morality.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 8, summer 1974. Pages 10-15.]

“One hypothesis we can formulate, adhering closely to a certain Marxist logic while turning it against some of its postulates about the philosophy of history, is that we are only now entering capitalist society (and, as always, we are only noticing this after the fact, when it is late, perhaps even too late) – or, if you prefer, we’re only now entering ‘pure’ capitalism, which does not have to deal constantly with heterogeneous social forces that it must either incorporate or repress, or with which it must strike some sort of compromise. ‘Pure’ capitalism is free to deal only with the effects of its own logic of accumulation and with those things necessary for its own reproduction.” [Étienne Balibar, “Critique in the 21ˢᵗ century: Political economy still, and religion again.” Emiliano Battista, translator. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 200, November/December 2016. Pages 11-21.]

“Many of the ‘Christians without a Church’ were nevertheless seduced by messianic themes, which proclaimed the advent of the kingdom of freedom and of divine justice, and they sought to decipher signs of their vision’s imminent realisation in contemporary events, such as the conversion of the Jews. Those communities that belonged to the Anabaptist tradition (the Mennonites and the Collegiants, for instance) were organised on the evangelical model, as free assemblies of believers, without any ecclesiastical hierarchy. This was another kind of democratic tendency, which grew up in opposition to the Calvinists but also came to influence some of the same social groups. Some Anabaptists, in particular the Collegiants, held that the same organisational model should be applied to civil society. They denied that the State had the right to order its subjects to break the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and they looked forward to an egalitarian society, founded on a communism of work and love for one’s neighbour.” [Étienne Balibar. Spinoza and Politics. Peter Snowdon, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Page 21.]

“In this Article, I contend that a belief in animal liberation qualifies as religion under the Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence of the United States Constitution. Thus, every time a prison warden, public school teacher or administrator, or government employer refuses to accommodate the ethical belief of an animal liberationist, they are infringing on that person’s religious freedom, and they should have to satisfy the same constitutional or statutory requirements that would adhere were the asserted interest based on more traditional religious exercise. One possible solution to the widespread violations of the First Amendment rights of animal liberationists would be the incorporation of a ‘Church of Animal Liberation’ under the Internal Revenue Code (as a proper church or as a religious organization). This would help to protect the free exercise rights of those who believe in animal rights because it would give them a religious organization to reference—with articles of incorporation that align with the jurisprudential definition of religion—in making their requests for religious accommodation.…

“It is worth briefly distinguishing animal rights from animal welfare; the latter philosophy can look extremely similar to animal rights, especially because animals are treated abysmally in the vast majority of ways they are used in society, so those who denounce cruelty to animals in the context of common uses are sometimes confused with animal liberationists.”

[Bruce Friedrich, “The Church of Animal Liberation: Animal Rights as ‘Religion’ Under the Free Exercise Clause.” Animal Law. Volume 21, number 65, October 2014. Pages 65-119.]

“The desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid, for separation and enclosure, the phantasy of extermination, today all haunt the space of this enchanted zone. In a number of cases, a wall is enough to express it. There exist several kinds of wall, but they do not fulfil the same functions. A separation wall is said to resolve a problem of excess numbers, a surplus of presence that some see as the primary reason for conditions of unbearable suffering. Restoring the experience of one’s existence, in this sense, requires a rupture with the existence of those whose absence (or complete disappearance) is barely experienced as a loss at all – or so one would like to believe. It also involves recognizing that between them and us there can be nothing that is shared in common. The anxiety of annihilation is thus at the heart of contemporary projects of separation.” [Achille Mbembe, “The society of enmity.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 200, November/December 2016. Pages 23-35.]

“… community policing has since its inception been regarded as a fundamental feature of counter-insurgency theory and practice, certainly since at least the 1970s when community policing became policing’s new big idea. So connected are counter-insurgency and community policing that one RAND [Research and Development Corporation] document produced for the Office of the [U.S.] Secretary of Defense in 2006 summed up fifty years of counter-insurgency research by observing that counter-insurgency ‘is best thought of as a massively enhanced version of the “community policing” technique that emerged in the 1970s.’. In the mind of the state, community policing is counterinsurgency, part and parcel of ‘the other war,’ as counter-insurgency is sometimes called, against insurgents, rebels, the politically organized and the socially marginalized.” [Mark Neocleous and Maria Kastrinou, “The EU hotspot: Police war against the migrant.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 200, November/December 2016. Pages 3-9.]

“We live in societies not merely – as [Thomas] Hobbes and [John] Locke believed – to satisfy pre-existent individual needs and wants, but because our very needs themselves are overwhelmingly collective and social – they could neither be fulfilled nor created without society. One of the chief ideological functions of contemporary moral and political philosophy is to obscure this point, and by doing so it has covertly underwritten and endorsed laissez-faire Liberalism. Society, this theory informs us, exists solely to give the pre-existing ‘individual’ more elbow room. It therefore sees any attempt to use society to create collective satisfactions and freedoms as an unjustifiable encroachment on the ‘rights’ of the ‘individuals.’” [Peter Binns, “Anti-Moralism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 10, spring 1975. Pages 18-21.]

“Inauthenticity …, playing a part, putting up a front, might at first sight seem more like a straight case of self-relationship, with no essential involvement of others. After all I can rehearse my part alone, in front of the mirror. If I am a secret transvestite I might altogether avoid the company of others when I play my part. But of course the whole significance of role-playing derives from it being essentially a way of presenting myself to others. And even when I am rehearsing, or secretly performing, its significance still derives from its being a pretended relating to others. It is of course a highly sophisticated activity, one which has to be learned and one which forms an essential element in the games of even very small children.” [Roger Waterhouse, “A Critique of Authenticity.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 20, summer 1978. Pages 22-26.]

“Implicit in … [the] conceptual opposition of state and civil or bourgeois society was an historical process resulting in the inversion of the order of determination between them, the unchaining of its remorseless economic laws leading to the abolition of its constitutive class relations.…

“… [Karl Marx’s] critique of political economy led to the identification of a law of accumulation that culminated in an absolute class polarization, inexorably leading to its own abolition, and with it the abolition of the state, private property and the family.

“In common with other Young Hegelians, Marx held that all particular relations and forms not directly based on human universality must be abolished. Marx’s specific variant of this conviction might be best described as ‘abolitionism.’ The Young Hegelians held that religion state and property deserved to perish—with different understandings of what that might entail—because criticism had demonstrated that they were artifacts of man’s servitude and ignorance. In the previous century Enlightenment criticism had hollowed out the old regime, making the Revolution both possible and necessary.”

[Gopal Balakrishnan, “The Abolitionist—I.” New Left Review. Series II, number 90, November–December 2014. Pages 101-136.]

“[Karl] Marx never abandoned the revolutionary horizon of his political-intellectual outlook in the approach to 1848, even though its distinguishing language of state and revolution was entirely omitted from his later economics. Moreover, this commitment to the Good Old Cause across the wretched decade that followed proved to be untimely in the best sense. The Paris Commune revealed the potential of the older problematic for further development, and kept open that horizon for another era. Thereafter, the impetus of the early Marx—of revolutionary abolitionism—has stirred in every subsequent great rebellion, from the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to anti-colonialism to the cycle of student and workers’ struggles that preceded the onset of neo-liberalism.” [Gopal Balakrishnan, “The Abolitionist—II.” New Left Review. Series II, number 91, January–February 2015. Pages 69-100.]

“The occult construction of the world …

“… Because our own explanations of phenomena are overwhelmingly cast in a causal mould, only in the interstices of an otherwise universal causality would it seem that there was anything left to explain. But it is not necessary to see things in this light. What I am postulating, as a correlate to magical or ritual thought, is a world-construction within which events are objectively speaking auite normal and causally-explicable (such as births, death, marriage, productive activities, the seasonal cycle, and so forth) – are grasped as synchronistic phenomena, i.e., as complexes of meaning.”

[Alfred Gell, “Understanding the Occult.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 9, winter 1974. Pages 17-26.]

“Taking my own view …, I have laid out a perspective in which religion is summoned as a stranger in the twilight of being friend as well as foe, a partner as well as an adversary, within a self-reflecting stance of philosophy. My thesis is that ‘truth,’ ‘name,’ and ‘habitation’ emerge as nodes of existential importance in religion seen from the angle of thinking initiated in the Twentieth Century and that this perspective not only structures a certain view of religion but is also a theme in its own right in contemporary philosophy …. However, the respects in which these confluences appear differ. What may be glimpsed from the pragmatic view of truth, for instance, as so many uses of the word (challenging the notion of a single concept of truth), does not find a parallel in myth or religion. Instead, myth and religion seem to he recognizable instances of this pragmatic ‘truth’ contrary to their own view.” [Lars Albinus. Religion as a Philosophical Matter: Concerns about Truth, Name, and Habitation. Creative Commons. Warsaw, Poland, and Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Open Ltd. imprint of Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2016. Page 222.]

“Our argument in this paper focuses on showing how and why all sides to the debate over economic determinism within Marxism failed to resolve it. We contend that a major contributing factor to this failure was the consistent posing of the debate in terms that clashed fundamentally with the most basic tenets of a Marxist epistemology or theory of knowledge. Our thesis is twofold: that the unresolved dilemma over economic determinism within Marxist theory has involved a distinctly non-Marxist epistemology, and that displacing the latter in favor of a Marxist epistemology leads directly to overcoming that persistent and pernicious dilemma.…

“Marxist theory includes a rejection of traditional epistemology, a deeply rejection indebted to [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s work while itself also a critique of that work. Marxist theory specifically rejects the notion of two realms, objective and subjective, in which the latter, the site of theory, aims and believes itself able to grasp the essential truth of the former. Instead, Marxist theory operates with a notion of theory or thinking as a constituent aspect of social reality. Centrally important consequences flow from our adherence to such a Marxist theory.”

[Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, “Marxist Epistemology: The Critique of Economic Determinism.” Social Text. Number 6, autumn 1982. Pages 31-72.]

“In … [a] sense there is no Marxist-materialist ‘theory of knowledge’ or ‘epistemology’ in the sense of a set of propositions about the possible forms and justifications of knowledge in advance of actual procedures of inquiry. Marxist-materialist epistemology, if it can be called that, is negative: it endeavors to remove obstacles (cf. Locke) from the paths of inquiry, to keep open what traditional epistemological ideologies seek to close. Thus, e.g., the considerations on truth did not seek to oppose a ‘Marxist’ conception of truth to others, but rather to remove the ideology of ‘truth.’ Such a position determined the structure of this essay, which laid itself out in the form of critical reactions to received positions.

“But this must be supplemented by the remark that nevertheless the considerations advanced have political significance, in the sense that it is a … thesis that an ‘open’ problematic of inquiry is one which, when appropriately embodied in social-political practices, is more likely to favor certain directions of social development than others (directions which lead to greater degree of human emancipation). But this is another story.”

[W. Suchting, “Knowledge and Practice: Towards a Marxist Critique of Traditional Epistemology.” Science & Society. Volume 47, number 1, spring 1983. Pages 2-36.]

“As I am placing polypoetry at the very opposite of improvisation, I extend rationality to the whole structure of the poem, following a lesson of [Jean-Paul] Sartre who in turn learned it from [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel ‘the true is the whole.’ Only totality is true, and only in front of the whole, is one able to reach the truth. The whole is polypoetic, which is connected to the world of media, beyond the totality of the body (mind, thought, heart). The polypoetic act uses a rational approach to reach its own truth.… The polypoetic act uses a rational approach to reach its own truth.… Polypoetry is so real that it goes on performing.…

“Polypoetry is conceived and made actual in the live show. It trusts sound poetry as the prima donna or point of departure in order to build a relationship with: musicality (accompaniment, rhythmical line), mime, gesture, dance, (interpretation, extension, integration of the sound poem), image (television, color transparency, association, explanation, redundancy, alternative), light, space, costumes, objects.…

“Polypoetry, far from criticizing past theories, clarifies performing actions. It was born just to be performed in front of an audience. It is an unavoidable dualism, in this it is dialogic. It deserves an active audience, an open-minded audience as said years ago, but not yet inter-active. It has provoked the birth if not of a group, at least of a nucleons where many performers mirror their activities. Polypoetry does not operate at all through fusions or ibridations, but keeps visible the role of protagonist belonging to vocorality. Sound poetry establishes dialogue with other media, without losing its own specificities.”

[Enzo Minarelli, “The manifesto of polypoetry.” Visible Language. Volume 35, number 1, 2001. Pages 116-125.]

“Not writing but voice is the essence of polypoetry or sound poetry – the voice with its direct, organic possibilities of expression whether technologically amplified or manipulated or not. Focusing on live performance, the interrelatedness of audience and poet is essential. While the voice is primary, the interaction with image is also essential. The author avoids ‘fusion’ in which the identity and character of various poetic components become confused and lost.

“Quality and virtue of the performing voice. The performing voice is the sum of so many voices: it is authentic, archetypal, bewitching, it comes directly from the deep interiority of the body and through the body from the beyond, metaphysical, ontological voice, a voice dialectic forever, a critical voice in its social integrity, an electronic voice in its intermediality, natural and artificial, the murmur of the mouth to regenerate and to deform; a distorted voice, phonetic stream like a God’s word to be accepted without any opposition, roya superior voice, in its oneness, voice of vitalism, maybe a voice of utopia.”

[Enzo Minarelli, “The singing blackbird: Voice, images, technology in polypoetry.” Visible Language. Volume 35, number 1, 2001. Pages 104-115.]

“Polypoetry is devised and realized for the live show; it gives to sound poetry the role of prima donna or starting point to link relations with musicality (accompaniment or rhythmic line), mimicry, movement and dance (acting or extension or integration of the sound text), image (television or slide projection, picture or installation, by association, explanation or alternative and redundance), light, space, costumes and objects.” [Enzo Minarelli quoted in Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Technology, Polypoetry: the Aura of Poly-performance.” Visible Language. Volume 35, number 1, 2001. Pages 20-35.]

“… gone are the days of ‘united front, class based, politics,’ because the claim of a more substantial class unity over and above the concrete struggles of the movement, are seen as nothing more than a chimera. This paper will argue that there is an urgent need for a political movement that can combine a dialectic of difference in unity, based on the politics of social need. In what follows, the paper will explain why social movements have distanced themselves from much of what has passed for 20ᵗʰ century Marxism. After which I discuss the negative implications of the current attraction to the discourse of modernity-post modernity, for the successful execution of an anti-capitalist project. Finally, a reinterpretation of crucial aspects of Marxism, provides the basis for an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and an emergent politics of social need.” [Peter Kennedy, “Reflections on Social Movements & the Politics of Need: Locating the Dialectic Between Identity & Difference.” Common Sense: Journal of Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists. Issue 20, 1996. Pages 4-19.]

“Although Marxist class analysis is a distinct enterprise from Weberian class analysis, it is possible for it to draw upon insights and research findings of the latter, although reinterpretation is then necessary. For example, research within a Weberian framework on social mobility, life chances, values and identities might be utilised within a Marxist analysis of the mechanisms promoting and inhibiting class consciousness.

“It may be useful, in drawing this section to a close, to suggest ways in which the theoretical apparatus of Marxist class analysis might be profitably developed. First, more dynamic interactive class models should be constructed; that is, the image of the flow diagram between classes and class fractions is superior to that of the typology or map.…

“Secondly, there is a need to re-examine the foundations of the labour theory of value in order to reconceptualise the state as part of the system it regulates rather than as an agent which ‘intervenes’ in it.”

[Jon Gubbay, “A Marxist Critique of Weberian Class Analyses.” Sociology. Volume 31, number 1, February 1997. Pages 73-89.]

“I might appear to have begun with a presumption: that a democratic world order is better than any other kind. This was not the approach with which I started my research; I sought (perhaps not always successfully) to begin without preconceptions. I was forced to adopt this as my basic political model only after examining the alternatives, the two ideologies which, within the global justice movement, compete directly or indirectly with the package of political positions most people recognize as ‘democracy’ – Marxism and anarchism.

“It is the common conceit of contemporary communists that their prescriptions have not failed; they have simply never been tried. Whenever it has been practised on a continental scale, the emancipation of the workers has been frustrated by tyrants, who corrupted [Karl] Marx’s ideology for their own ends. For some years, I believed this myself. But nothing is more persuasive of the hazards of Marx’s political programme than The Communist Manifesto. It seems to me that this treatise contains, in theoretical form, all the oppressions which were later visited on the people of communist nations. The problem with its political prescriptions is not that they have been corrupted, but that they have been rigidly applied. Stalin’s politics and Mao’s were far more Marxist than, for example, those of the compromised – and therefore more benign – governments of Cuba or the Indian state of Kerala.”

[George Monbiot. The Age of Consent: A Manifesto For A New World Order. New York: Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 2003. Google Play edition.]

“For Western Marxists, the problem of Weberianism (or the problem of the social and intellectual pathology he described; it being never altogether clear the extent to which these symptoms were pathological for Weber, and the extent to which his treatment of them was to be seen as merely a healthy clearing of the air) posed a threat to socialism at least as much as it represents a standpoint from which to attack capitalism.…

“Thus, Western Marxism … faced the dilemma or retaining some standpoint for making rational statements about society and the world, without succumbing to Weberian instrumentality and quantification. If they strayed too far into [Max] Weber’s camp, they feared becoming, not so much Weberians, as Leninist and Stalinists.”

[George Friedman, “Eschatology vs. Aesthetics: The Marxist Critique of Weberian Rationality.” Sociological Theory. Volume 4, number 2 autumn 1986. Pages 186-193.]

“I … use the simple phrase ‘imperialism of our time’ with the more modest aim of avoiding terms like ‘New Imperialism’ which have been in vogue at various times, with varying meanings. Imperialism has been with us for a very long time, in great many forms, and constantly re-invents itself, so to speak, as the structure of global capitalism itself changes. What is offered here is a set of provisional notes toward the understanding of a conjuncture, ‘our time,’ which is itself a complex of continuities and discontinuities – and, as is usual with conjunctures, rather novel.” [Aijaz Ahmad, “Imperialism of Our Time.” Socialist Register. Volume 40, 2009. Pages 43-62.]

“Marxist archaeologists have typically been more prevalent (although still a minority) in the subdiscipline of historical archaeology, which deals with the recent past. Historical archaeology has been defined as the archaeology of the capitalist world, although more benign terms such as ‘modernism’ or ‘the modern world’ are more common …. [It] … has recently [been] claimed that historical archaeology has yet to develop an adequate set of problems to guide and sustain the discipline. I would argue that this is because historical archaeologists have seldom made capitalism the explicit focus of their research.” [LouAnn Wurst, “The historical archaeology of capitalist dispossession.” Capital & Class. Volume 39, number 1, 2015. Pages 33-49.]

“In the work that follows, I investigate how the phenomenological emphasis in the work of Latina feminists brings issues of culture and communication directly to bear in ways that allow many of the normative presumptions carried within the discourses that sustain academic and epistemological legitimation to be exposed and interrogated—pushing scholarship into a closer connection with the world we live in. I take that world to be one in which interracial, interethnic, and intercultural communication is interpersonally strained, sustaining systems of meaning in which firmly held and unchecked prejudices remain tacitly and powerfully at work. In pursuing this project it is possible to cultivate perceptual capacities that aid us greatly in critiquing and undercutting racist, sexist, heterosexist presumptions, and individualistic dispositions as they are expressed (made actual) in the concrete, immediate, and embodied lives of human beings communicating. Attention to lived experience is essential, but is not in itself sufficient for this task.” [Jacqueline M. Martinez, “Culture, Communication, and Latina Feminist Philosophy: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Culture.” Hypatia. Volume 29, number 1, winter 2014. Pages 221-236.]

“… [There are] two powerful forces dominating the social sphere at this time. These are a largely freewheeling corporate enterprise system, exerting its will locally and globally, in tandem with an unprecedentedly influential and privately-owned information apparatus, largely devoted to money-making and the avoidance of social criticism.

“These are the primary sources of today’s deepening social crisis, though clearly other tributaries to current disorders also exist. Still, it is the corporate world’s almost total rejection of social accountability, whatever the arena, that produces a national mood of futility and a steady unravelling of the social fabric.

[Herbert Schiller. Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1996. Kindle edition.]

“Herbert I. Schiller (1919-2000) was the most prominent figure among a group of Critical Theorists (something of a euphemism for Marxist-influenced scholarship in North America) commenting on trends in the information domain during the late twentieth century.” [Frank Webster. Theories of the Information Society. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 125.]

“It is my view that we may best appreciate information trends by situating them within the history and pressures of capitalist development. In this, history does matter, so one is not suggesting that capitalism is the same today as it ever was. The informational capitalism we have today is significantly different from the corporate capitalism that was established in the opening decades of the twentieth century, just as that was distinguishable from the period of laissez-faire of the mid- to late nineteenth century. An adequate account of contemporary capitalism would need to identify its particular features, prominent among which are the presence of unprecedentedly large transnational corporations, an intensification of competition on a global scale (and thereby an acceleration of the pace of change within capitalist parameters), the relative decline of national sovereignty and, above all, globalisation. While it is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, globalisation does, for the most part, shape the world in ways that bring it into conformity with Western ways.” [Frank Webster. Theories of the Information Society. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 267-268.]

“In an extremely cogent manner, [Karl] Marx shows the relation between the science of economics and idealist philosophy from [Immanuel] Kant to [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel. The task is to integrate the human science of political economy with Hegel’s Phenomenology, with its concept of negation, the transformation of nature by human labor that humanizes nature and as its counterpart raises the individual to the state of universal man with an understanding of the collective relations and objectivity of being. It is such a unity that Marx seeks for philosophy and economics—a unity that would lead to a new conception of man and the human future, to a praxis that reconciles speculative knowledge and human life as a historical development. In Marx’s opinion, philosophy reaches an impasse in the form of speculative idealism. By restricting itself to the comprehension of what is, as Hegel did, philosophy ends in an insurmountable contradiction. However, the relation of the two disciplines allows political economy, on the one hand, to expand to include the entire problem of man and the relation of man to nature, and philosophy, on the other hand, to transcend itself as speculative knowledge and to realize itself in an action that is the effective emancipation of man rather than merely speculative wisdom.” [Jean Hyppolite. Studies on Marx and Hegel. John O’Neill, translator. New York: Harper Torchbooks imprint of Harper & Row, Publishers. 1973. Pages 72-73.]

“The question is, what relevance has [Karl] Marx’s Hegelianism today, and what is the relevance of taking such a Hegelian approach to the history of Marxism subsequent to Marx? ….

“Marx was not the pre-eminent communist of his time, but rather its critic, seeking to push it further. Marxism was the attempted Hegelian self-consciousness of proletarian socialism as the subject-object of capital.”

[Chris Cutrone, “Defending Marxist Hegelianism against a Marxist critique: Chris Cutrone of the US Platypus group takes issue with Mike Macnair.” Weekly Worker. Issue 878, August 11th, 2011. Pages 14-15.]

“Now, Critical Theory (and [Theodor] Adorno’s Negative Dialectic), as developed in the Frankfurt School, seems aimed, like an active Darwinism (or more accurately, a post-Hegelian Marxist praxis) at propelling culture forward by a critique of that present which is a remnant of the past: the status quo. Hence the critique of repetitious and formulaic art, and the anti-systematic, anti-methodological, and difficult to summarize, appropriate, and co-opt style of Adorno’s thinking that favors bold schisms and unfamiliar shocks, which would awaken people from their dogmatic slumber. (A possible critique of such a notion might make reference to the fact that errant DNA would more often lead to dysfunction rather than better adaption to existing and new niches in the ecological and sociological environment.)

“The link between the particular and practice in opposition to theory, is important, in that while theory often strives for that which is universal and absolute (think science and mathematics), practice operates temporally through change, as the particular itself also changes relative to some other particular (spatiotemporally). There is a tension between the contingent, singular, dynamic particular, and the theoretical reasoning that tries to freeze it, e.g. in a concept or percept, through hypostasis, reification and analytical definition: a fetishism that isolates some feature of the inexhaustible ‘object.’”

[J. D. Casten. Cybernetic Revelation: Deconstructing Artificial Intelligence. Eugene, Oregon: Post Egoism Media. 2012. Page 444.]

“I have argued here for the indissociability of theory and praxis, and for the capacity of metaphysics to go beyond prevailing forms of thought and praxis and thereby to reveal the limitations of the metaphysical assumptions which dominate them. As well as serving to make the world intelligible, a metaphysical system must articulate the problems and aspirations of people and reveal to them how such problems can be overcome and how their aspirations can be realized. In earlier chapters of this work the nature of this dialect between metaphysics and action has been shown: how in the early Middle Ages a version of Neoplatonic Christianity served to unify society and then to provide the means whereby the church was able to achieve ascendancy over secular rulers, how in the seventeenth century mechanistic materialism was able to provide a coherent perspective on both the social and natural world to provide the rising bourgeoisie with a new basis for interpreting the past and legitimating their struggle for political power, and how Neoplatonic Marxism provided the ideological means for the radical intelligentsia and the proletariat to gain and maintain power in the Soviet Union.” [Arran Gare. Beyond European Civilization: Marxism, Process Philosophy, and the Environment. Bungendore, New South Wales, Australia: Eco-Logical Press. 1993. Pages 131-132.]

“What is critical urban theory? While this phrase is often used in a descriptive sense, to characterize the tradition of post-1968 leftist or radical urban studies, I argue that it also has determinate social–theoretical content. To this end, building on the work of several Frankfurt School social philosophers, this paper interprets critical theory with reference to four, mutually interconnected elements—its theoretical character; its reflexivity; its critique of instrumental reason; and its emphasis on the disjuncture between the actual and the possible. On this basis, a brief concluding section considers the status of urban questions within critical social theory. In the early 21ˢᵗ century, I argue, each of the four key elements within critical social theory requires sustained engagement with contemporary patterns of capitalist urbanization. Under conditions of increasingly generalized, worldwide urbanization, the project of critical social theory and that of critical urban theory have been intertwined as never before.…

“… Rather than affirming the current condition of cities as the expression of transhistorical laws of social organization, bureaucratic rationality or economic efficiency, critical urban theory emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space—that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium and outcome of historically specific relations of social power. Critical urban theory is thus grounded on an antagonistic relationship not only to inherited urban knowledges, but more generally, to existing urban formations. It insists that another, more democratic, socially just and sustainable form of urbanization is possible, even if such possibilities are currently being suppressed through dominant institutional arrangements, practices and ideologies. In short, critical urban theory involves the critique of ideology (including social–scientific ideologies) and the critique of power, inequality, injustice and exploitation, at once within and among cities.”

[Neil Brenner, “What is critical urban theory?” City. Volume 13, numbers 2–3, June–September 2009. Pages 198-207.]

“The main concern of this paper is what I take to be the ultimate purpose of critical urban theory: implementing the demand for a Right to the City. But that is a demand, a goal, that needs definition. Whose right is it about, what right is it and to what city? The paper begins with a look at the actual problems that people face today, and then looks at them in their historical context, focusing on the difference between the crisis of 1968, which produced the demand for the Right to the City, and the crisis we confront today. The question then is: how do we understand the Right to the City today, and how can a critical urban theory contribute to implementing it? The paper suggests an approach to action that relies on three steps a critical theory could follow: exposing, proposing and politicizing.” [Peter Marcuse, “From critical urban theory to the right to the city.” City. Volume 13, numbers 2–3, June–September 2009. Pages 185-196.]

“Bankocracy consists in circulating debt to make money solely from money and time. The primary relationship between a creditor and a borrower is not important. Everything is arranged in order to multiply the number of people involved in the chain; debt must circulate to the point that the debtors no longer know to whom they owe money. A state that wants to offer reassurance regarding its solvency need only increase its penetrability. In reality, it is of little importance if it will be able to repay what it owes. The objective is not for debt to be settled but for it to circulate in order to produce profit.… What is important is not the initial promise but further surplus-promises, the game of simulacrum and its bluffs.” [Marie Cuillerai and Maria Kakogianni, “Bankocracy: Greek money and the ‘new idea’ of Europe.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 186, July/August 2014. Pages 23-28.]

“I apply the term ‘critical conceptualism’ to the study of social phenomena especially as they concern problems stemming from racial and ethnic classifications. And given its corrective attention to institutionalized prejudice, critical conceptualism is ultimately an ana lytical project geared on promoting renewed understanding of the structure, context and ameliorative possibilities of the political state. At its core is the belief that such understanding is prerequisite for developing the moral sensibilities likely to nurture in us a broader sense of responsibility for the improved quality of communal life.…

“… the critical conceptualistic responsibility of New Negro art to display with dignity and self esteem black American ontological and expressive forms as well as black American folk legacies cannot be overlooked as important contributions to the pursuit of a society grounded in more harmonious coexistence.”

[Winston Napier, “Affirming Critical Conceptualism: Harlem Renaissance Aesthetics and the Formation of Alain Locke’s Social Philosophy.” The Massachusetts Review. Volume 39, number 1, spring 1998. Pages 93-112.]

“Relational-cultural theory (RCT) theorists advocate expanding the multicultural/social justice counseling competencies beyond the domains of self-awareness, cultural knowledge, and culturally responsive helping skills. This article provides an overview of RCT and discusses how creating and participating in growth-fostering relationships are essential dimensions of human development and psychological well-being. Implications of this theoretical model for counseling practice are also addressed.

“Relational-cultural theory … was conceived after the publication of Jean Baker Miller’s (1976) Toward a New Psychology of Women, a groundbreaking book that has been translated into more than 20 languages. The ideas in Miller’s book emerged from her clinical practice with women in which she noted that the centrality of relationships in her clients’ lives was inconsistent with the traditional theories of counseling and human development she had been taught in medical school. According to Miller and other feminist theorists of the time, these traditional theoretical models emphasize individuation, separation, and autonomy as markers of emotional maturity and psychological health.”

[Dana L. Comstock, Tonya R. Hammer, Julie Strentzsch, Kristi Cannon, Jacqueline Parsons, and Gustavo Salazar II, “Relational-Cultural Theory: A Framework for Bridging Relational, Multicultural, and Social Justice Competencies.” Journal of Counseling & Development. Volume 86, number 3, summer 2008. Pages 279-287.]

“Relational-cultural theory has evolved from the work of Jean Baker Miller … and scholars at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute (JBMTI), located at the Stone Center at Wellesley College. Unlike many traditional human development theories, which often reflect values of individuation, autonomy, and separation …, RCT [relational-cultural theory] posits that people develop more fully through connections with others. Relationship, rather than autonomy, is the cornerstone of growth. According to RCT, people become relationally complex rather than increasingly individuated and autonomous. Therefore, RCT promotes a contextual and relational lens for understanding human development.” [Thelma Duffey and Catherine Somody, “The Role of Relational-Cultural Theory in Mental Health Counseling.” Journal of Mental Health Counseling. Volume 22, number 3, July 2011. Pages 223-242.]

“RCT [relational-cultural theory] was developed in the 1970s, primarily by psychologists and psychiatrists affiliated with the Stone Center at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. Jean Baker Miller’s (1976) groundbreaking work, Toward a New Psychology of Women, provided the foundation for the ongoing development and application of this theoretical perspective.… RCT is feminist theory, due to its analysis and understanding of the significance and impact of gender upon personal and societal relationships. Built upon an approach to therapy, RCT is basically a theory of human development, as well as a therapeutic modality, that emphasizes the belief that individuals grow in connection with one another and that both parties benefit from the relationship …. While the initial focus of this theory was informed by studying mostly white women and the nature of their connections, RCT has expanded and can be applied to all human relationships, with cultural contexts being a necessary consideration in understanding these relationships.” [Ann R. Alvarez and Marceline M. Lazzari, “Feminist Mentoring and Relational Cultural Theory: A Case Example and Implications.” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. Volume 31, number 1, 2016. Pages 41-51.]

“Moving toward connection, according to RCT [relational-cultural theory], promises developmental growth through three primary processes; healing, resilience, and resistance …. First, healing can resolve previous psychological damage from experiences of relational, political, and spiritual exclusion. Second, recovering from relational hardships through resilience is associated with positive outcomes when there is at least one growth-fostering relationship …. Resilience contributes to increased efficacy in relationships and results in positivconnections. Third, … resistance challenges the ‘power-over paradigm’ ….” [Amy Russell, “Lesbians Surviving Culture: Relational-Cultural Theory Applied to Lesbian Connection.” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. Volume 24, number 4, 2009. Pages 406-416.]

“Using Relational-Cultural Theory as a theoretical model for interpretation, this article outlines a father’s growth and process of development in a growth-fostering relationship with his son.…

“… This study shows that fathers grow in mutuality and specifically with their sons. Fathers absorbed the unconditional love and acceptance. Transformation allowed for new experiences, perceptions, emotions and reflections that released fathers from behind the mask of masculinity … where the relational core languished desiring to be loved just for itself.”

[Carol Watson-Phillips, “Relational Fathering: Sons Liberate Dads.” Journal of Men’s Studies. OnlineFirst edition. August, 2016. Pages 1-17.]

“Founded in 1995, the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute bases its work on the Relational-Cultural Model of psychological development, which grew out of a collaborative theory-building process led by Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues. The Institute offers workshops, courses, professional trainings, publications, and ongoing projects which explore applications of the relational-cultural approach. At the heart of this work is the belief that the Relational-Cultural model offers new and better ways of understanding the diversity and complexities of human experience.” [Jean Baker Miller, “What Do We Mean by Relationships?” Working paper number 22. Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Wellesley Centers for Women. Wellesley, Massachusetts. 1986. Pages 1-13.]

“My own work at this time centers on trying to understand more about the nature of ‘relational contexts’ and ‘relational modes’ which foster psychological development. I feel very fortunate to be able to do this work with several colleagues who share a general approach and whose work appears in the Working Paper Series produced by the Stone Center for Developmental Studies and Services at Wellesley College. At times, our ideas flow from the interactions among us, so that it would be inappropriate to say that an idea ‘belonged’ to any one person; the idea becomes enlarged and transformed in interchange so that it is not what it was when it began and it is truly everyone’s creation. On other points, we do not all think alike and we keep struggling to honor these differences and to learn from them.” [Jean Baker Miller. Toward a New Psychology of Women. Second edition. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. 1986. Page xxxiii.]

“A relational model of therapy requires a reframing of some of the key concepts characterizing the therapeutic process. For example, we believe that transference is a highly relational term that becomes a central focus of the therapeutic work. However, in contrast to more traditional views, we do not find that the therapist’s neutrality is necessary for transference phenomena to emerge fully and productively. Reframing countertransference around the question of how connected or disconnected the therapist feels helps move the therapy to increased mutuality and empowerment. Our understanding of the unconscious is that experiences which have been repressed, dissociated, split off and out of awareness are brought into the relationship when the patient can feel that it is a safe relational context. Finally, we see resistance as a reflection of the patient’s desire for connection and her reasons for fear of it, rather than in terms of a battle between therapist and patient.” [Jean Baker Miller and Irene Pierce Stiver, “A Relational Approach to Understanding Women’s Lives and Problems.” Psychiatric Annals. Volume 23, number 8, August 1993. Pages 424-431.]

“The intent of this paper is to examine the inherent contradictions in the practice of psychotherapy that, if left unexamined, ruin the emancipatory prospects that it holds. Critical theory and, more specifically, Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action is utilized as a starting point for reconceptualizing psychotherapy.…

“… The therapy must contest the way dominant culture is reproduced and transmitted into the daily life and psyche of the individual in such a way that creates suffering in his or her own sociocultural praxis. By conceiving the source of suffering as developmental, emancipatory psychotherapy can best be envisioned as educational in intent.…

“Meaning is achieved through the coordinated activity of two or more individuals. In settings where there is asymmetry, one participant has more knowledge, power and expertise. Nonetheless the encounter can still result in true self-development for both. If we wish to preserve communicative action as a grounding for an emancipatory psychotherapy, we need to provide an account of therapy that allows for true mutual understanding and real connection to the particular other’s suffering and to the therapists’ motivation to care, despite the presence of asymmetry and the overarching steering media.”

[James H. Sorrell, “The Pleasure of Dissent: A Critical Theory of Psychotherapy as an Emancipatory Practice.” American Journal of Psychotherapy. Volume 60, number 2, 2006. Pages 131-145.]

“Emancipation refers to people’s abilities to pursue their ends in life without oppressive restrictions. Psychology needs an emancipatory orientation as much as society needs an emancipatory psychology. My objective in this paper is to contribute to the development of an emancipatory psychology, a psychology concerned with oppression and liberation. The reason for focusing on emancipation is that it is a prerequisite for the good life and the good society …. An emancipatory psychology seeks to eliminate oppression, deprivation, exploitation and exclusion. It seeks to remove psychological, social, and political barriers to the fulfillment of basic values such as self-determination, caring and compassion and distributive justice …. Oppression exists because dominant groups advance their own interests at the expense of others with less power. Psychology has much to offer to the elimination of oppression ….” [Isaac Prilleltensky, “Human, moral, and political values for an emancipatory psychology.” The Humanistic Psychologist. Volume 24, number 3, autumn 1996. Pages 307-324.]

“There is clearly a wide range of human activities associated with the notion of emancipation. Finding a means of repairing a bothersome leaky faucet is, in a sense, liberating. So too, in its widest sense, is the freedom of a people from oppressive political rule. Thus the suggested criterion for valuing human social acts cuts a very wide swath, being a useful criterion for day-to-day mundane activities through to the grandest of all human endeavours. Be it the discovery of an effective means of helping someone through a depressive episode or the reformulation of a statistical problem permitting a solution, the activities of psychologists can be seen as emancipatory in varying degrees, and this is the criterion of value being suggested.” [Tim B. Rogers, “Toward an Emancipatory Psychology.” Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne. Volume 31, number 3, July 1990. Pages 215-217.]

“A theoretically reinvigorated humanistic psychology that draws on the best of its past, on constructivist developments in theory, and on the newer neurosciences and advances in mind-body studies is well placed to provide the basis of a postmodern emancipatory psychology. Once it embraces its own polycentrism and unavoidable incoherence, its core values of privileging the unique experience of individual human subjects; placing human suffering, well-being, and the universal need to search for meaningful answers to existential questions at its center; embracing the need to contain and comfort the high anxiety now endemic on both individual and cultural levels; and committing itself to both abatement and prevention of suffering and to the further evolution of human consciousness suggests that the humanistic tradition has much of abiding value to offer individuals and groups in a postmodern world that is in the process of being born. Outside the highly bureaucratized and increasingly centralized health care industry, where the marketplace can act like a real marketplace, people are free to buy what they are looking for from those who wish to provide it, there will be plenty of room for dedicated and enterprising professionals to make a decent living without selling their souls to the psychoindustrial complex.” [Maureen O’Hara, “Emancipatory therapeutic practice in a turbulent transmodern era: a work of retrieval.” The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 37, number 3, summer 1997. Pages 7-33.]

“The task of this article is to work out more precisely the points at which a theory of social practices can be distinguished from its theoretical alternatives, and how its basic vocabulary thus amounts to a novel picture of the social and of human agency. To that end, however, it is necessary to build up ‘ideal types’ of theories which hardly correspond to the variability and distinctiveness of ‘real’ authors. I will use an idealized model of practice theory which leans partly on different and largely common elements of [Pierre] Bourdieu, [Anthony] Giddens, late [Michel] Foucault, [Harold] Garfinkel, [Bruno] Latour, [Charles] Taylor or [Theodore R.] Schatzki, ignoring the peculiarities of the single authors, and which is partly of programmatic character. Similarly, I confront this ideal type of practice theory with idealized theoretical alternatives: the model of the homo economicus and the homo sociologicus, but in particular with culturalist mentalism, textualism and intersubjectivism.” [Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 5, number 2, May 2002. Pages 243-263.]

“A theory of social practices can reformulate elements of [Michel] Foucault’s or [Pierre] Bourdieu’s … work. It also allows for a selective integration of [Bruno] Latour’s … actor-network theory.…

“A theory of social practices is surely still more ‘asymmetric’ than Latour’s symmetric anthropology would like to have it. But both on the level of artefacts as well as on that of affects and senses it allows for a more materialistic understanding of the social than most of the approaches that followed the cultural and textual turn. A social practice perspective on the social basically focuses human activity (partly also non-human activity).”

[Andreas Reckwitz, “Affective spaces: a praxeological outlook.” Rethinking History. Volume 16, number 2, June 2012. Pages 241-258.]

“It seems that post-Wittgensteinian theory of social practices has good reason to regard artefacts as necessary and influential components of social practices, while wishing to retain an ‘asymmetric’ relation between them and the human agents. When artefacts can only be effective within practices insofar as they are ‘handled’ by human agents and when they are sites of ‘materialized understanding,’ then their status obviously cannot be completely ‘equal’ with that of human agents and their embodied understanding.” [Andreas Reckwitz, “The Status of the ‘Material’ in Theories of Culture: From ‘Social Structure’ to ‘Artefacts.’” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 32, issue 2, June 2002. Pages 195-217.]

“… [There has been a] long history of unsuccessful resistance to the UFO taboo to date. The problem is that agnosticism alone does not produce knowledge, and thus reduce the ignorance upon which modern sovereignty depends. For a critical theory of anthropocentric rule, therefore, a science of UFOs ironically is required, and not just a science of individual cases after the fact, which can tell us only that some UFOs lack apparent conventional explanations. Rather, in this domain what is needed is paradoxically a systematic science, in which observations are actively sought in order to analyze patterns from which an intelligent presence might be inferred. That would require money, infrastructure, and a long-term commitment of the kind that to date has been possible only for epistemic authorities, or precisely those actors most resistant to taking UFOs seriously. Still, given the potential disjunction of interest between science and the state, it is possible here for science to play a key role for critical theory. Whether such a science would actually overcome UFO ignorance is unknowable today, but it is only through it that We might move beyond the essentially theological discourse of belief and denial to a truly critical posture.” [Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO.” Political Theory. Volume 36, number 4, August 2008. Pages 607-633.]

“… I don’t think the answer is yet another organization. I think we both figured that out some time ago. The problem is with the fundamental structure of socialist organizations themselves. I’ve been developing these ideas for some years, so it’s sort of hard for me to express them in only a few words, but I can try to summarize.

“Socialist organizations today are sects. They are all incredibly small organizations (even ‘large’ groups like the PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation [sic; Party for Socialism and Liberation] which boast ‘thousands’ of members in a country of 300 million) that are for the most part isolated from one another. I don’t know if you’ve read Hal Draper’s articles on this, which I’ve posted over the years, but basically he came up with an awesome analogy. Leftist organizations nowadays are run like small businesses, whose product is revolution and who are competing against one another for members and ‘market share.’ They are incredibly reluctant to work with one another because they are afraid that the other organization will try to ‘take credit’ or ‘steal their members.’”

[R. Shay. The Party’s Over: Communist Organization in the Modern World. Location unknown: Whocanafforda Press. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“It is [Karl] Marx, along with [Nick] Land, who remains the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker. Contrary to the all-too familiar critique, and even the behaviour of some contemporary Marxians, we must remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it, understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.…

“As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration. Similarly, the assessment of left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at least in part, a severe misrepresentation. Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.…

“We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.…

“Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.”

[Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.” Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside. Joshua Johnson, editor. New York: Name Publications. 2013. Pages 135-155]

“It would be inaccurate to present accelerationism as a unified theory with broad consensus around a clear-cut diagnosis of the current politico-economic impasse, the means and tactics of rupture, or the specific liberatory ends all this might serve. We can, however, speak of a broad division between the ‘libidinal’ accelerationism associated primarily with the body of French poststructuralist thought mentioned above, and a more recent ‘neo-rationalist’ incarnation exemplified by #Accelerate.” [Michael E. Gardiner, “Critique of Accelerationism.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 34, number 1, January 2017. Pages 29-52.]

“Enlightenment is an attitude of openness. An Enlightened person is one who is not easily led but instead can utilise the faculty of reason freely and make their own decisions. Dogma on the other hand is the attitude of the closet. It is caused, however, by a situation in which one is not free to make one’s own decisions. ‘Listen Buddy, money makes us do the type of things we don’t want to.’ We take the stance of dogma when we are pushed into a closet and the door is shut behind us (or, as is often the case, when we enter the closet because we want to and shut our own doors). Hence, we cannot see the world, nor can we hear it, nor do we speak about it, for Zarathustra has three shadows! We amble along blindly and allow others to make our decisions for us. Dogma is the attitude of the eye of Cyclops whilst Enlightenment is an attitude of freedom. However, it is an attitude which we cannot simply wake up an choose one day for it is a collective attitude which only ever arises out of certain practical (ie. material) preconditions – that is, the conditions of freedom. Thus, before we can say what Enlightenment is we must first of all understand what freedom is, that is, we must understand what it means and entails to be free, and this can only be achieved through self-knowledge. We must understand why we are what we are.” [Brian McGrail, “What is Enlightenment?” Common Sense: A journal of a wholly new type. Issue 8, September 1989. Pages 50-61.]

“… this article will adopt a broadly Hegelian approach to collective notions of the good life. For [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, autonomy, rights and happiness are all made possible by social relationships. Autonomy, rights and happiness are only possible under specific social conditions that are never entirely within our control, and so individual pursuits of the values are destined to fall short.…

“The relationship between happiness and contentment is critically important to cultural constructions of the good life, but so is the recognition of the distinction between these experiences. Happiness and contentment are distinct emotional experiences that pertain to unique criteria and result in specific outcomes. Consequently, the methods used to pursue these experiences differ as well.”

[Jordan McKenzie, “Happiness Vs Contentment? A Case for a Sociology of the Good Life.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 3, 2015. Pages 252-267.]

“In order to provide a more fruitful approach to the sociology of penal systems, it is necessary to strip from the social institution of punishment its ideological veils and juristic appearance and to describe it in its real relationships. The bond, transparent or not, that is supposed to exist between crime and punishment prevents any insight into the independent significance of the history of penal systems. It must be broken. Punishment is neither a simple consequence of crime, nor the reverse side of crime, nor a mere means which is determined by the end to be achieved. Punishment must be understood as a social phenomenon freed from both its juristic concept and its social ends. We do not deny that punishment has specific ends, but we do deny that it can be understood from its ends alone. By way of analogy, it might be noted that no one would dream of developing the history of military institutions or of a specific army out of the immutable purpose of such institutions.

“Punishment as such does not exist; only concrete systems of punishment and specific criminal practices exist. The object of our investigation, therefore, is punishment in its specific manifestations, the causes of its changes and developments, the grounds for the choice or rejection of specific penal methods in specific historical periods. The transformation in penal systems cannot be explained only from changing needs of the war against crime, although this struggle does play a part. Every system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships. It is thus necessary to investigate the origin and fate of penal systems, the use or avoidance of specific punishments, and the intensity of penal practices as they are determined by social forces, above all by economic and then fiscal forces.”

[Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer. Punishment and Social Structure. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 2003. Page 5.]

“Contemporary scholars have modified and tested [Georg] Rusche and [Otto] Kirchheimer’s … labor surplus and punishment theory. Today, labor surplus is typically operationalized as the unemployment rate, while punishment is operationalized as the imprisonment rate ….” [Shelly S. Schaefer and Christopher Uggen, “Blended Sentencing Laws and the Punitive Turn in Juvenile Justice.” Law & Social Inquiry. Volume 41, issue 2, spring 2016. Pages 435–463.]

“[Georg] Rusche and [Otto] Kirchheimer … theorize a direct connection between the imposition of criminal sanctions and the supply of surplus labor. For capitalism their argument implies that imprisonment and unemployment vary directly …. study analyzes postwar trends in prison admission rates in the United States compare the explanatory power of the Rusche-Kirchheimer (RK) thesis with alternative explanations of these trends (demographic change, organizational inertia, and crime variations). Furthermore, because this application of the Rusche-Kirchheimer formulation gives central importance to competitiveness of labor kets, we consider the theoretical and empirical implications of the reduction competition characteristic of advanced capitalist economies.” [James Inverarity and Daniel McCarthy, “Punishment and Social Structure Revisited: Unemployment and Imprisonment in the United States, 1948-1984.” Review article. The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 29, number 2, summer 1988. Pages 263-279.]

“The authors of this book attempt to prove two points: first, that punishment in general is a function of economic conditions; and second, that the methods of punishment in use at any particular epoch depend on the available means of production and the state of the labor market. This ecumenical thesis is based on studies limited in time to the period from the close of the Middle Ages to the present day, and confined in space to Western Europe, Russia being completely, and the United States largely ignored. Since the purpose of the book is not to present original information but to elucidate a point of view, the authors have made no attempt at exhaustive first-hand study of original documents—though considerable use is made of statistics.” [David Riesman, “Punishment and Social Structure.” Review article. Columbia Law Review. Volume 40, number 7 November 1940. Pages 1297-1301.]

“The most recent research on the ‘Rusche and Kirchheimer hypothesis’ generally demonstrates the difficulty in finding a straightforward relationship between the size of the unemployed and imprisoned populations—especially if one extends analysis to a much-needed comparative dimension …. Developments in the United States in the last 20 years or so are also usually mentioned to contradict [Georg] Rusche and [Otto] Kirchheimer’s hypothesis, because in that instance a cyclically oscillating unemployment rate does not seem to have had anything in common with a vertically increasing imprisonment rate (one that is exceptional at a global level). For that reason, in my analysis of the emergence of the ‘great American internment’ during the crucial period of capitalist reorganization in the United States between the oil energy crisis in 1973 and the early 1990s—when the U.S. economy finally took off again—I claimed that we should not speak so much of unemployment as of the ‘pressure to perform’ placed on the working class ….” [Dario Melossi, “A New Edition of Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later: A Timely Event.” Social Justice. Volume 30, number 1, spring 2003. Pages 248-263.]

“The main object of their work is the specific form that punishment assumes during the bourgeois epoch: imprisonment. The central category they [Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer] employ in addressing the history of detention within this epoch is the principle of less eligibility. Briefly, this principle functions in relation to the state of the labor market. It posits that the standard of living within prisons (as well as for those dependent upon the welfare apparatus) must be lower than that of the lowest stratum of the working class, so that, given the alternative, people will opt to work under these conditions and punishment will serve as a deterrent.” [Dario Melossi, “Punishment and Social Structure.” Social Justice. Review article. Volume 40, numbers 1–2, spring–summer 2014. Pages 265-284.]

“In this work, [Georg] Rusche and [Otto] Kirchheimer go back to the Middle Ages and examine the close relationship between forms of punishment and the social and economic structure and needs of society in each major period down to the post-War and early Fascist era. They study the various forms of punishment that have been used—fines, the galleys, the grosser forms of corporal punishment, transportation, imprisonment, hard labor, and so on—and show that the specific forms used in any particular period reflect current social and economic conditions, and especially reflect the labor market and the resultant attitude toward labor. They find that in periods when labor was a drug on the market in Europe and human values were low imprisonment in idleness and capital punishment were among the standard punishments.” [Austin H. MacCormick, “Punishment and Social Structure.” Review article. Harvard Law Review. Volume 53, number 7, May 1940. Pages 1216-1218.]

“The authors feel that the moral, humanitarian influence (the penitentiary idea) which sought to overthrow the classical penologists followed almost automatically in the wake of the decline of the prisoners’ economic value to the overseers and jailers. The reappearance of the ‘ax, the whip and starvation’ technique in the last half of the 19ᵗʰ century was due to the uselessness of prison labor in the face of expanding industry. The reason improvements in penology cannot develop indefinitely is because of the fundamental principle that the lot of the prisoners should be no higher than the lot of the lowest member of society outside the jail. As the use of probation and the money-fine increased in about the 1990’s, based upon the equivalence between the money of the upper class and the rime of the lower class, no decrease in the number of crimes committed resulted.” [Walter Bromberg, “Punishment and Social Structure.” Review article. The American Journal of Orthodpsychiatry. Volume 11, issue 2, April 1941. Pages 390-391.]

“Historians of punishment have neglected the social, economic, and political factors, the social attitudes, and the philosophical ideas that have precipitated changes in the penal system. They have been too engrossed with the details of the forms and methods of punishments at different stages in history to attempt to explain why these changes occurred. The authors of the present volume, however, are less interested in penal methods than in the underlying forces that brought them about.” [Morris Ploscowe, “Punishment and Social Structure.” Review article. Social Service Review. Volume 13, number 3, September 1939. Pages 540-541.]

“Punishment and Social Structure is the product of two German emigre scholars working in the International Institute for Social Research, which transferred its activities from Frankfurt am Main [in Germany] to New York City in 1934 after its suppression by the German Government. The work was begun by [Georg] Rusche in Germany in 1931, and completed in the United States by [Otto] Kirchheimer. It is an historical study in the sociology of punishment. The authors’ thesis is that the dominant factor in determining the penal methods of any epoch is the basic economic needs of a commodity-producing society.” [Howard E. Jensen, “Criminology and Penology.” Social Forces. Volume 18, number 2, December 1939. Pages 289-291.]

“Mine is a ‘political’ and a ‘voluntarist’ Marxism: a preoccupation with the vagaries of the class struggle prevents me from discerning the economic ‘law of motion’ of feudal society …. Nonetheless, it is, indeed, central to my viewpoint that a ‘fusion’ (to put it imprecisely) between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’ was a distinguishing and constitutive feature of the feudal class structure and system of production. This was manifested in the fact that the ‘economic’ conditions for the reproduction of the ruling class – the income it required to carry out its life activities, including the continuing subjection of the peasantry – depended upon a system of extraction of surplus labour from the direct producers which was characterized by extra-economic (‘political’) compulsion. In turn, the varying forms of development of this system of surplus extraction by extra-economic compulsion, in connection and in conflict with the development of the productive forces by peasant possessors of the means of subsistence (land, tools and so forth), provide an indispensable key to the evolution of the European feudal economy: to its specific patterns of agricultural and demographic development which resulted in declining labour productivity; to its characteristic types of unproductive industrial production and exchange, dominated by luxury goods to fill the ‘political’ needs of the lordly ruling class; and to its particular forms of crisis, manifested in the exhaustion of the productive forces (including the producing population itself), the decline of lordly revenues, and the seigneurial reaction – as well as the ways in which the system was or was not superseded in different regions by different types of social-productive systems.” [Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pages 213-327.]

“… [A] voluntarist Marxism was vulnerable to an outflanking by poststructuralism and the dissolution of the relations of production – the central concept in [Karl] Marx’s critique of capitalism – into a plurality of power-relations.” [Alex Callinicos. Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2004. Page xviii.]

“… [This article] considers the approaches within the Marxist-Leninist traditions which can be identified as deterministic Marxism and voluntarist Marxism neither of which is theoretically or ethically satisfactory. The general argument is related to Marxism and Marxism-Leninism in Africa.…

“I have tried to show the flaws of both determinist and voluntarist Marxism in the above pages. Many have been seduced by the elements of truth and the grandeur of [Karl] Marx’s critique of capitalism both in its moral and its analytical aspect. They have attempted to tailor the unacceptable aspects of Marxism so that a coherent theory can be salvaged by an adroit manipulation of these two distinct elements. Perhaps Marxism can be salvaged in some way – though not by determinists or voluntarists. It is perfectly possible that a Marxist type of socialism or communism will one day emerge, as predicted, and that the laws of history which Marx believed he expressed will be vindicated. But, as this century draws to a close – nearly 100 years after the death of Marx – it may be right to say boldly that his great vision is irremediably flawed. As a revolutionary theory, the flaws are only too sadly obvious. As a political programme, there is little currently in it to distinguish it from contemporary capitalism. As science, its status is in doubt.”

[Carol Pearce, “A Critique of Marxism-Leninism as Theory and Praxis.” Review of African Political Economy. Number 50, March 1991. Pages 102-114.]

“Self-determination theory (SDT) is an empirically based theory of human motivation, development, and wellness. The theory focuses on types, rather than just amount, of motivation, paying particular attention to autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and amotivation as predictors of performance, relational, and well-being outcomes. It also addresses the social conditions that enhance versus diminish these types of motivation, proposing and finding that the degrees to which basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are supported versus thwarted affect both the type and strength of motivation.…

“As a macrotheory of human motivation, self-determination theory (SDT) addresses such basic issues as personality development, self-regulation, universal psychological needs, life goals and aspirations, energy and vitality, nonconscious processes, the relations of culture to motivation, and the impact of social environments on motivation, affect, behavior, and well-being. Further, the theory has been applied to issues within a wide range of life domains.”

[Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, “Self-Determination Theory: A Macrotheory of Human Motivation, Development, and Health.” Canadian Psychology. Volume 49, number 3, August 2008. Pages 182-185.]

“Our principal aim is to articulate a framework for the general study of eudaimonia, and to introduce a specific working model of eudaimonia derived from self-determination theory …, with elements that are amenable to empirically based testing and elaboration. Because eudaimonia refers to living well, any theory of eudaimonia consists of a set of prescriptions and proscriptions. How well the theory fairs in terms of yielding a high quality life is thus an empirical question. In other words, the criteria for judging a theory of eudaimonia rest in its ability to predict, and when implemented, bring about, outcomes that people value deeply and that can be said to represent wellness.” [Richard M. Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward L. Delci, “Living Well: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Eudaimonia.” Journal of Happiness Studies. Volume 9, issue 1, January 2008. Pages 139-170.]

“… the Aristotelian view of eudaimonia considers well-being not as a state of pleasure versus pain, but as living well.…

“Many of these elements in Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia are at the core of self-determination theory’s (SDT’s) conceptions of wellness. SDT began with a focus on intrinsic motivation, or the pursuit of an activity because of its inherent interest and enjoyability …. In this research the role of rewards, the importance of competence, and the central role of autonomy in motivation became topics of study. We then shifted attention to extrinsically motivated activities, those that are instrumental rather than inherently enjoyable, and to how they are adopted and enacted.”

[Richard M. Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward L. Deci, “Living Well: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Eudaimonia.” The Exploration of Happiness: Present and Future Perspectives. Antonella Delle Fave, editor. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Science+Business Media. 2013. Pages 117-139.]

“… given the research findings, we suggest that self-determination theory (SDT) may be an appropriate theoretical framework for conceiving of and implementing patient-centered for health that focuses on improving the delivery of high quality and cost-effective primary care services.” [Leslie William Podlog and William J. Brown, “Self-determination Theory: A Framework for Enhancing Patient-centered Care.” The Journal for Nurse Practitioners. Volume 12, issue 8, September 2016. Pages e359-e362.]

“In this paper we outline how the SDT [self-determination theory] perspective provides a valuable framework for understanding the motivational underpinnings of important relational processes, such as attachment, intimacy, communality, and interdependence, and further how this motivational structure helps to predict personal growth and development. Relationships research typically focuses on how individual personality factors (e.g., attachment style) and/or situational factors (e.g., partner responsiveness) affect how important relational processes unfold (e.g., conflict resolution, intimacy) and how these exchanges impact relational functioning (e.g., commitment, satisfaction). Importantly, the incremental value of the SDT perspective is that it provides a framework for understanding both personality and context.” [Jennifer G. La Guardia and Heather Patrick, “Self-Determination Theory as a Fundamental Theory of Close Relationships.” Canadian Psychology. Volume 49, number 3, August 2008. Pages 201-209.]

“One of the key postulates from SDT [self-determination theory] is that motivation varies in kind, and the most self-determined types of motivation lead to the most adaptive outcomes. Thus, if we are to understand motivational outcomes, we need to go beyond a focus on motivational quantity (i.e., high levels of motivation) and take into consideration the quality of motivation (i.e., the presence or absence of self-determined forms of motivation, such as intrinsic motivation and integrated and identified regulations).” [Robert J. Vallerand, Luc G. Pelletier, and Richard Koestner, “Reflections on Self-Determination Theory.” Canadian Psychology. Volume 49, number 3, August 2008. Pages 257-262.]

“We will suggest a eudaimonistic framework grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which has demonstrable explanatory value with respect to adult friendship …, and well-established applicability across the life span ….

“The term, ‘eudaimonia,’ signifies ‘living well’ or ‘living a good life,’ and friendship is by all accounts essential to living a good life ….”

[David Ian Walker, Randall Curren, and Chantel Jones, “Good Friendships among Children: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 3, 2016. Pages 286-309.]

“We have argued that the road to eudaimonic well-being consists of people’s efforts to fulfill their potential through engaging in meaningful pursuits. How, specifically, might such pursuits help people fulfill their potential and achieve lasting well-being? According to Self-Determination Theory, eudaimonic activity produces well-being if it satisfies basic human needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence …. [As has been suggested,] ‘Key components of positive health … address essential features of engagement in living …’ ….” [Michael F. Steger, Todd B. Kashdan, and Shigehiro Oishi, “Being good by doing good: Daily eudaimonic activity and well-being.” Journal of Research in Personality. Volume 42, issue 2, February 2008. Pages 22-42.]

“The following discussion proposes principles and examples to help advance dialogue towards a ‘critical HRD [human resource development]’ space that might invite participation of researchers, theorists, and practicing professionals in HRD. Clearly there exist theoretical dilemmas and deep contradictions in enacting critical HRD in contemporary organizations. These difficulties largely may be anticipated in what some … argue to be the incommensurable interests of critical orientations (privileging social justice, human rights and environmental sustainability) and organizations/management (maximizing productivity and capital). But critical orientations are far from homogeneous. Considerable theoretical work has opened useful conceptions that move beyond rigid ideological dichotomies of management/labor or false consciousness/emancipation. Furthermore some critically oriented development work is evident now in organizations, suggesting that sites of critical HRD already exist in practice if not in name, however peripherally. Meanwhile, recent work in critical management studies suggests radical shifts underway in re-thinking management, work, knowledge, and organizations. A critical HRD might contribute a necessary perspective to this work, and derive strength from it.” [Tara Fenwick, “Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmas for Theory and Practice.” Human Resource Development International. Volume 8, number 2, June 2005. Pages 225-238.]

“The leading critical theorists are well aware of the circumstance that since the normative foundations of critical theory do not guarantee the truth and objectivity of social scientific statements or propositions, immanent procedures and concrete analyses are and will remain a basic requirement of critical theoretical social scientific practice. Taking experience seriously …, … one cannot doubt the testability of empirical statements unless one is also willing to deny the possibility of experience itself.… Critical theorists … bring … criteria into play through immanent procedures and concrete analyses in order to fulfil the sufficient conditions of critical theoretical social scientific practice.” [Piet Strydom, “Metacritical Observations on a Reductive Approach to Critical Theory: Ruane and Todd’s ‘The Application of Critical Theory.’” Political Studies. Volume XXXVIII, issue 3, September 1990. Pages 534-542.]

“… contemporary critical theorists seek to develop complex and powerful theory that is also empirically grounded and validated. This ambitious goal cannot be realized if the formulation of the theory and its empirical application are kept radically separate from each other. Stated most generally, it can be achieved only if theory and data are given equal emphasis in, and empirical research informs all stages of, the theory-building process. This requires the empirical application, evaluation and subsequent revision of the theory.” [Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, “The Application of Critical Theory.” Political Studies. Volume XXXVI, issue 3, September 1988. Pages 533-538.]

“In order to demonstrate the value of a critical approach to the ethics of information security we have undertaken a content analysis of NHS information security policies. In this section, we present the research framework, before, describing the research methods adopted, to explore it.…

“… We believe that critical theory is particularly well attuned to issues concerning collective agency, social structure and in particular the socio-economic constitution of society. Using this lens therefore allows better insights into ethical issues arising from these factors. This does not mean that one could not describe the ethics of, say, the commodification of patient data or managerial power struggles in healthcare organisations in other terms, such as those of utilitarianism, Kantian deontology or Aristotelian virtue ethics.”

[Bernd Carsten Stahl, Neil F. Doherty, Mark Shaw, and Helge Janicke, “Critical Theory as an Approach to the Ethics of Information Security.” Science & Engineering Ethics. Volume 20, issue 3, September 2014. Pages 675-699.]

“Games are allegories for our contemporary life under the protocological network of continuous informatic control. In fact, the more emancipating games seem to be as a medium, substituting activity for passivity or a branching narrative for a linear one, the more they are in fact hiding the fundamental social transformation into informatics that has affected much of the globe during recent decades. In modernity, ideology was an instrument of power, but now ideology is a decoy, as I hope to have shown with the game Civilization. So a game’s revealing is also a rewriting (a lateral step, not a forward step). A game’s celebration of the end of ideological manipulation is also a new manipulation, only this time using wholly different diagrams of command and control.” [Alexander R. Galloway, “Playing the code: Allegories of control in Civilization.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 128, November/December 2004. Pages 33-40.]

“The anthropogenic global environmental changes which these power relations have generated over the past two centuries have received the attention of several disciplines, such as environmental history and Earth System science, but have not been adequately theorized. I shall begin by considering some of the theoretical options currently offered for an understanding of the historical relation between human societies and the remainder of the biosphere, arguing that in order to assemble an integrated theory of global environmental history, we shall have to clarify our position with regards to some contested distinctions commonly referred to as ‘Cartesian,’ including our position with regards to posthumanist conceptions of distributed agency.” [Alf Hornborg, “Artifacts have consequences, not agency: Toward a critical theory of global environmental history.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 20, number 1, February 2017. Pages 95-110.]

“CodePink Women for Peace is a women-initiated, grassroots peace and social justice movement that started at a peace vigil outside the White House in November 2002. The Department of Homeland Security says ‘Code Yellow for Elevated Risk of Terrorist Attack,’ and we say, ‘CodePink for Peace.’ …

“That’s it, women. This is your call to action. It’s not enough to commiserate with your friends over dinner. It’s not enough to wring your hands. It’s good to sign petitions, but it’s not enough. It’s good to call your elected representatives and say you want the troops home now, but that’s not enough either. It’s good to identify yourself as a feminist: It’s even better to act like one. You are the only people who can stop this illegal and immoral war. CodePink is hitting the streets, and we want you to join us.”

[Nancy Kricorian, “CodePink: Women for Peace.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Volume 34, number 1/2, spring–summer 2006. Pages 523-533.]

“This study, based on an analysis of the web-based activities of CODEPINK—a self-identified women’s movement for peace—contributes to knowledge in this area by examining the use of the Internet in citizen activism.…

“… the theoretical perspective focuses on multiple publics, their location as communicative entities and their use of publicity to obtain a measure of public credibility. From this theoretical base, I seek to answer two general questions: How does CODEPINK use the web to achieve its goals? To what extent do these uses support the role of the Internet as a deliberative space for counterpublics? These questions are intentionally broad, allowing for a multilayered consideration of the processes at work, rather than prediction or causality.”

[Maria Simone, “CODEPINK Alert: Mediated Citizenship in the Public Sphere.” Social Semiotics. Volume 16, number 2, June 2006. Pages 345-364.]

“Owning up to being an animal, a creature of earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain: blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers, mingling our ears with the thunder and the thrumming of frogs, and our eyes with the molten sky. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place—this huge windswept body of water and stone. This vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled.

“Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.”

[David Abram. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2010. Page 12.]

“The phrase that titles this book, ‘becoming animal,’ carries a range of possible meanings. In this work the phrase speaks first and foremost to the matter of becoming more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality. Other meanings will gradually make themselves evident to different readers.…

“… As a phenomenologist, I am … taken with lived experience—with the felt encounter between our sensate body and the animate earth—to suit his philosophical taste.”

[David Abram. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 2010. Page 19.]

“The following pages take as their point of departure the idea that the central contribution of [Karl] Marx’s discourse to the comprehension of modern civilization lies in the discovery, formulation and critical analysis of a structuring behavioural disposition [comportamiento] of that civilized life on the basic plane of the economy. It is the behavioural disposition of labour [trabajo] and enjoyment that the human subject maintains with nature, constituted as a contradictory reality: on one side, as a process of the production and consumption of ‘use-values’ and, on the other, as a process of the ‘valorization of’ the commodity ‘value’ of those same objects.” [Bolívar Echeverría, “‘Use-value’: Ontology and semiotics.” Andrés Sáenz De Sicilia and Sandro Brito Rojas, translators. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 188, November/December 2014. Pages 24-38.]

“Is the attempt to separate Marxism from the study of culture and to rescue critical knowledge from the shoals of cultural specificity simply a turf war between left cultural studies and more orthodox forms of Marxism? How is this attempted separation related to the claim that new social movements have split the Left, deprived us of common ideals, factionalized the field of knowledge and political activism, reducing political activism to the mere assertion and affirmation of cultural identity? The charge that new social movements are ‘merely cultural,’ that a unified and progressive Marxism must return to a materialism based in an objective analysis of class, itself presumes that the distinction between material and cultural life is a stable one. And this recourse to an apparently stable distinction between material and cultural life is clearly the resurgence of a theoretical anachronism, one that discounts the contributions to Marxist theory since [Louis] Althusser’s displacement of the base-superstructure model, as well as various forms of cultural materialism—for instance, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” [Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural.” New Left Review. Series I, number 227, January–February 1998. Pages 33-44.]

“… it makes sense to ask: which social configuration of ‘life’ enters into the question, how best to live? If I ask how best to live, or how to lead a good life, I seem to draw upon not only ideas of what is good, but also of what is living, and what is life. I must have a sense of my life in order to ask what kind of life to lead, and my life must appear to me as something I might lead, something that does not just lead me. And yet it is clear that I cannot ‘lead’ all aspects of the living organism that I am, even though I am compelled to ask: how might I lead my life? How does one lead a life when not all life processes that make up a life can be led, or when only certain aspects of a life can be directed or formed in a deliberate or reflective way, and others clearly not?” [Judith Butler, “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?: Adorno Prize Lecture.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 176, November/December 2012. Pages 9-18.]

“The reiterative speech act … offers the possibility – though not the necessity – of depriving the past of the established discourse of its exclusive control over defining the parameters of the universal within politics. This form of political perform ativity does not retroactively absolutize its own claim, but recites and restages a set of cultural norms that displace legitimacy from a presumed authority to the mechanism of its renewal. Such a shift renders more ambiguous – and more open to reformulation – the mobility of legitimation in discourse. Indeed, such claims do not return us to a wisdom we already have, but provoke a set of questions that show how profound our sense of not-knowing is and must be as we lay claim to the norms of political principle. What, then, is a right? What ought universality to be? How do we understand what it is to be a ‘human’? The point … is not then to answer these questions, but to permit them an opening, to provoke a political discourse that sustains the questions and shows how unknowing any democracy must be about its future. That universality is not speakable outside of a cultural language, but its articulation does not imply that an adequate language is available. It means only that when we speak its name, we do not escape our language, although we can – and must – push the limits.” [Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2000. Pages 11-43.]

“Telling a story about oneself is not the same as giving an account of oneself. And yet we can see in the example above that the kind of narrative required in an account we give of ourselves accepts the presumption that the self has a causal relation to the suffering of others (and eventually, through bad conscience, to oneself). Not all narrative takes this form, clearly, but a narrative that responds to allegation must, from the outset, accept the possibility that the self has causal agency, even if, in a given instance, the self may not have been the cause of the suffering in question.

“Giving an account thus takes a narrative form, which not only depends upon the ability to relay a set of sequential events with plausible transitions but also draws upon narrative voice and authority, being directed toward an audience with the aim of persuasion. The narrative must then establish that the self either was or was not the cause of that suffering, and so supply a persuasive medium through which to understand the causal agency of the self. The narrative does not emerge after the fact of causal agency but constitutes the prerequisite condition for any account of moral agency we might give. In this sense, narrative capacity constitutes a precondition for giving an account of oneself and assuming responsibility for one’s actions through that means. Of course, one might simply ‘nod’ or make use of another expressive gesture to acknowledge that one is indeed the one who authored the deed in question. The ‘nod’ functions as an expressive precondition of acknowledgment. A similar kind of expressive power is at work when one remains silent in the face of the query ‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’ In both examples, though, the gesture of acknowledgment makes sense only in relation to an implied story line: ‘Yes, I was the one who occupied the position of the causal agent in the sequence of events to which you refer.’”

[Judith Butler. Giving an Account of Yourself. New York: Fordham University Press. 2005. Pages 18-19.]

“In a sense, my account of myself is never fully mine, and is never fully for me, and I would like to suggest that this ‘interruption’ of the account always takes place through a loss of the sense of its being mine in any exclusive way. This interruption and dispossession of my perspective as mine can take place in different ways. There is the operation of a norm, invariably social, that conditions what will and will not be a recognizable account. And there can be no account of myself that does not, to some extent, conform to norms that govern the humanly recognizable, or that negotiate these terms in some ways, with various risks following from that negotiation. But, as I will try to explain later, it is also the case that I give an account to someone, and that the addressee of the account, real or imaginary, also functions to interrupt the sense of this account of myself as mine. If it is an account of myself, and it is an accounting to someone, then I am compelled to give the account away, to send it off, to be dispossessed of it at the very moment that I establish it as my account. No account takes place outside the structure of address, even if the addressee remains implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecified.” [Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics. Volume 31, number 4, winter 2001. Pages 22-40.]

“In Giving an Account of Oneself, [Judith] Butler … argues that ‘the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms.’ She goes on to note that: ‘If the “I” is not at one with moral norms,’ this means that ‘the subject must deliberate upon these norms,’ and that part of such a deliberation will ‘entail a critical understanding’ of the social genesis and meaning of those norms.” [Jane Rendell, “Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally.” Journal of Visual Culture. Volume 15, number 3, December 2016. Pages 334-348.]

“… Judith Butler’s 2005 book Giving an Account of Oneself … [is] a short and surprisingly accessible meditation on some of the conclusions for ethics that emerge from close readings of some pivotal European philosophers, including [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, [Friedrich Wilhelm] Nietzsche, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, and [Emmanuel] Levinas. Her starting point is actually Problems of Moral Philosophy, a 1963 set of lectures by Theodor Adorno, only recently available in English. Adorno’s concern there, like much of his work from 1933 on, focuses on the violence we do others in the name of value and ideology—even at those moments when we act on principle, thinking what we do just and good, and perhaps even insisting that what we do is good for the other, as well.” [Neil Easterbrook, “‘Giving an Account of Oneself’: Ethics, Alterity, Air.” Extrapolation. Volume 49, number 2, summer 2008. Pages 240-260.]

“Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself does not discuss shame explicitly, but the site of her discussion is the scene of ‘exposure’ before another, in which one tries to account for what one has done. Following [Friedrich Wilhelm] Nietzsche, she notes that such an account is often (although in her opinion not always) prompted by an accusation or an allegation. We are asked whether we are responsible for an evident injustice: ‘Was it you?’ Hence we are in the scene prompted by Adler’s query — was it me, and if not, could it have been?

“This question prompts an attempt to account for one’s actions, to explain oneself. For Nietzsche, Butler argues, the result is a self-beratement that becomes morality, guilt and bad conscience. In her own discussion here, however, she wants to hold open the possibility that the act of giving an account does not always take place in a punitive context, and that it may have more positive consequences that Nietzsche suggests. This in spite of the fact that, she argues, the attempt to give an account of oneself inevitably fails, precisely because the subject is constitutively unable to fully account for its own origins and actions.”

[Anna Szörényi, “Giving an Account of Myself: Transgenerational Holocaust Guilt in the Company of Bernhard Schlink and Judith Butler.” The Australian Feminist Law Journal. Volume 33, December 2010. Pages 37-56.]

“… I propose a modus operandi that I will tentatively term a ‘reflexive historical realism’ …. It is based on several premises: (1) the need to historicize the concepts used to refer to ‘similar’ phenomena in the ethnographic (or social sciences) literature, (2) the need to clarify personal political projects (that is, so to speak, self-historicization), (3) the need to treat concepts and models as part of the reality to be explained, (4) the belief that social transformation is not totally arbitrary or a mere construction of the willful intellectual reading of the text of symbolic social interaction (that is, that significant causal relations can be found for social phenomena that do not hinge on interpretation), and (5) the belief that there is a reality, beyond symbolic structuring, which produces ‘surprise’ and ‘shock’ in our models and, often, is the force that impels their transformation ….” [Susana Narotzky, “The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” Current Anthropology. Volume 48, number 3, June 2007. Pages 403-424.]

“In this book we use ethnography—both as a mode of inquiry and as a form of political engagement—from the perspective of historical realism. The object of our study is the social relationships that produce—historically—an economic ‘factor’ that has recently been described as “social capital” and has been attached to particular spaces or territories in what has been termed by social scientists and economic historians ‘regional economy,’ ‘industrial district,’ or even ‘economic nationalism.’ … We seek them to problematize the issue of place in the context of contemporary capitalism, an issue that addresses the anthropologist or sociologist interested in revived expressions of locality in a globalizing world as much as the geographer or economist interested in the benefits to be gained for a regional economy from its ‘local culture.’ …

“… the fault line of our own explorations runs somewhere between … two geographies [Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’ and David Harvey’s ‘structural logics of capitalist production and regulation’], seeking to discover the dialectical constitution of the one by the other: a history in which people [re-]produce concrete and abstract artifacts for life, these concrete abstractions then providing the landscape that conditions subsequent generations’ reproduction and transformation. We term this kind of approach ‘historical realism’ ….”

[Susana Narotzky and Gavin A. Smith. Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2006. Pages 3-4.]

“A genuinely socialist and revolutionary strategy on Palestine cannot be based on a purely military struggle, or on a rhetorical ‘steadfastness.’ Rather it consists in mobilizing the maximum available forces, in the Arab world, Israel and the world as a whole, for the goal of achieving Palestinian statehood.

“Such a struggle certainly requires the deployment of the widest and most unified front of Arab forces, but it also necessitates appealing to dissenting forces inside Israel and to those inside the imperialist countries who for a variety of reasons, favor recognition of Palestinian rights. The Vietnamese and Zimbabweans, for example, did not reject diplomatic activity and compromises as inherently unworthy of their national liberations. A facile refusal to engage in such political and diplomatic work is not, despite its apparently militant character, either revolutionary or socialist. The chances of success, of ending the torment of the Palestinians, are not very great in the present circumstances. But if the Palestinian cause continues to be obstructed then it is only chauvinists and the enemies socialism on both sides of the Arab-Israeli national boundary who will benefit.”

[Fred Halliday, “Revolutionary Realism and the Struggle for Palestine.” MERIP Reports. Middle East Research and Information Project, Inc. Number 96, May 1981. Pages 3-12.]

“That [‘enlightened version of Marxism’] was never abandoned. I would go even further and say that Critical Theory is a progressive form of Marxism that no longer mechanically accepts Marxist categories in changed historical situations. The theory of immiseration, the unmediated reduction of the superstructure to the base, the theory of the crash as deriving from the fall in the rate of profit have all turned out to be untenable. But basic Marxist themes have never been abandoned. The hypothesis that world history can be described as the result of the struggle between outer and inner nature, and the theory of productive forces and class relations, have never been given up. What have been abandoned are certain economistic categories and predictions that have proven to be wrong. That was entirely in [Karl] Marx’s spirit. He always referred to tendencies and countertendencies. You are right: our interest turned toward a cultural area neglected by the Marxist tradition—psychology. Psychology does not exist in classical Marxism and so we have surely added something to that theory. This, of course, does not fit into that petit-bourgeois catechism of Marxism as proposed by Bukharin. Thus, if the Russian tradition is seen as the legitimate successor of Marxism, then we have not been Marxists.” [Leo Löwenthal. An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal. Martin Jay, editor. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1987. Pages 64-65.]

“The recognition that culture has an ethical significance need not undermine the plausibility of universal moral values and ethical principles. The fact that cultures are different and particularistic does not entail cultural relativism.…

“… Descriptive cultural relativism (DCR) describes a relativity of moral agents’ judgments to their culture. It describes the differences between cultures in their moral views and standards. By contrast, normative cultural relativism (NCR) requires that moral judgments and standards be considered valid or invalid only relative to an agent’s own culture; in other words, his or her moral views or actions ought to be considered right if and only if they are judged so according to the cultural standards of the community.…

“I am primarily interested in developing a cultural critique of NCR.…

“If moral differences from culture to culture are understood, however, as belonging to groups of like-minded moral agents, this does not necessarily entail incommensurability among them.”

[Xiaorong Li, “A Cultural Critique of Cultural Relativism.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 66, number 1, January 2007. Pages 151-172.]

“Organizational healing refers to how organizations not only recover from difficulties and resume normal functioning but also explains how organizations enhance their performance after experiencing trauma or harm ….

“… Explained as psychological improvement and narrative meaning making …, these cognitive mechanisms of PTG [post-traumatic growth] enable individuals to derive meaning and growth from difficulty. Growth refers to cognitive assessments that reorient individuals toward positive psychological health. Healing focuses on dynamics that support posttraumatic organizational growth. Underlying that growth are organizational mechanisms required to resume functioning and build strength to enhance future performance and thereby foster positive organizational systems and cultures.”

[Edward H. Powley, “The Process and Mechanisms of Organizational Healing.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Volume 49, number 1, 2012. Pages 42–68.]

“Our age is … the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its cruet claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.

“… each passion … is the agent of good in the world and that its enemy is the genius of evil. But to-day these passions desire to establish this not only politically, but morally, intellectually and esthetically. Antisemitism, Pangermanism, French Monarchism, Socialism are not only political manifestations; they defend a particular form of morality, of intelligence, of sensibility, of literature, of philosophy and of artistic conceptions. Our age has introduced two novelties into the theorizing of political passions, by which they have been remarkably intensified.”

[Julien Benda. The Treason of the Intellectuals. Richard Aldington, translator. New York: The Norton Library imprint of W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 1969. Page 27.]

“Let me turn … to Judith Butler’s work. Of all of the suspects I rounded up, she has been the one most suspicious of ontological claims. She has argued repeatedly that the recourse to an ontological level has typically had the effect of making basic commitments appear to be natural, uncontestable features of human being and the world. Butler has always been eager to make trouble for any thinking that displays such characteristics because it invariably operates in ways that occlude the workings of power. This distancing move away from traditional ontology is not joined, however, with a total renunciation of ontology. Foundations, she argues, are ‘indispensable’ but ‘contingent.’ …

“… [A] more sophisticated picture of the autonomous self of liberalism nevertheless remains problematic when viewed from the perspective of weak ontology. When one takes seriously the notion of ontological sources, it means that inarticulacy and incompleteness are seen as being continually operative constituents of human agency.”

[Stephen K. White, “Weak Ontology: Genealogy and Critical Issues.” The Hedgehog Review. Volume 7, number 2, summer 2005. Pages 11-25.]

“I argue for a ‘weak’ ontological model of ‘foundations’ and employ it in a critical reconstruction of Judith Butler’s work.…

“Weak ontologies emerge from the conjunction of two insights: acceptance of the idea that all fundamental conceptualizations of self, other and world are contestable, and awareness that such conceptualizations are nevertheless unavoidable for any sort of reflective ethical and political life.…

“… For a weak ontology, … a seeking of final security is its own kind of forgetting of finitude. The pleasures of this kind of homecoming induce an inattentiveness to the constitutive gap between the human and the beyond human. Vivifying finitude in everyday life means cultivating a quiet, ongoing resistance to finding one’s truth in some identity; but it also means giving place to the constitutive weight of concrete identity.”

[Stephen K. White, “As the World Turns: Ontology and Politics in Judith Butler” Polity. Volume 32, number 2, winter 1999. Pages 155-177.]

“The weak ontologist does not know with certainty that strong foundations are false; rather she can merely point to the lack of success of any given foundation in being wholly and universally affirmed by humankind. This lack of success in the past, however, does not demonstrate that the future will hold merely more of the same. I prefer to call this more modest position ‘nonfoundationalism.’…

“A weak ontology is constituted by a set of ontological figures that are held in a nonfoundationalist fashion. In calling something a ‘figure’ (for example, an account of the self–other relation), I mean to highlight the fact that we do not embrace such an account on the basis of reasoning alone. We also embrace a figure because it appeals to us—like a work of art—in an aesthetic-affective sense.”

[Stephen K. White, “Violence, Weak Ontology, and Late-Modernity.” Political Theory. Volume 37, number 6, 2009. Pages 808-816.]

“… I would prefer to simply appeal to something we might call non-transcendental, ‘exemplary ontological scenes.’ The one I find most compelling has at its core an image or portrait of agents within a context of ‘communicative action’ who unexpectedly sometimes stand up and express a ‘no’ to the binding normative order implicit in the context of their interaction and thereby demand justification, despite what is likely to be a low probability of winning this fight in any strategically rational sense. This core exemplary scene, cobbled out of an interpretation of what we find admirable in the idea of human dignity, in turn animates my ethical and political reflections. The scene reflects my depth hermeneutic. It has, for me, a cognitive, normative and aesthetic-expressive force. This scene is exemplary in that it is cognitively plausible, normatively compelling and sublime. My attachment to it is always entangled with what I would have to call a kind of faith, which may have religious sources, or not; but, in either case, it will be of a weak ontological sort. Reason simply does not extend far enough to guarantee the transcendental status of this exemplary scene I affirm.” [Stephen K. White, “Does Critical Theory need strong foundations?” Philosophy and Social Criticism. Volume 41, number 3, 2015. Pages 207-211.]

“We want to … elucidate a novel way of understanding [Jürgen] Habermas’s project as a whole.

“In what follows, we will do this by reconfiguring the standard understanding of the onto-ethical infrastructure of the communicative paradigm [theory of communicative action]. On the basis of that, one can better comprehend the character of nonviolent opposition to the law. More specifically, we contend that there is a no-saying dimension in the communicative paradigm that is just as primordial as the understanding-oriented or consensual one.”

[Stephen K. White, “‘No-Saying’ in Habermas.” Political Theory. Volume 40, number 1, 2012. Pages 32-57.]

“Strong are those ontologies that claim to reflect for us ‘the way the world is,’ or how God’s being stands to human being, or what human nature is.…

“… I specifically reply to … [the] criticism that weak ontological commitments are too weak for the real world of politics …. The ethos I argue for is not religiously grounded and does not necessarily lead to a stance of nonviolence; nevertheless, my intention is to explore whether we might be able to cultivate a set of very roughly analogous, nontheistic commitments. Such an ethos is not generated in isolated, individualistic self-examination; rather it begins and ends with the tensions of political life that inhabit relations of identity/difference.” [Stephen K. White, “Reply to James Miller’s Review of The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen.” Political Theory. Volume 39, number 1,2011. Pages 174-176.]

“If the hard surfaces of strong ontologies carry clear, substantive directions for practical life, the opposite is true of weak ontologies. Their surfaces do not bear unqualified inscriptions. And yet these ontologies do provide a figuration of the world that appears to promise at least some orientation or passage to moral-political reflection. Weak ontologies are also not rooted in a crystalline conviction of ultimate cognitive truth. Rather, their proponents acknowledge that they are interpretations of the world. They are contestable pictures with a validity claim that is two dimensional.”

[Stephen K. White, “Weak Ontology and Liberal Political Reflection.” Political Theory. Volume 25, number 4, August 1997. Pages 502-523.]

“Using Stephen K. White’s … arguments for the viability of ‘weak ontologies,’ I suggest that a critical post-structuralist approach does not need to be anathema to the making of claims, nor should it be seen as suffering from a paralytic disjuncture from the ‘real world.’ Rather, maintaining critical commitments can mean being reflexive about the inter-subjectivity and indeterminacy of the claims that are ultimately made, and of being accountable to them.…

“‘Weak ontology’ does not refer to the (lack of) persuasiveness of a theory’s ontological commitments, so much as it refers to the process of arriving at those commitments and an acknowledgement of their contestability. Weak ontology sees that the costs of bracketing out contingency and indeterminacy, which a strong ontology must do, far outweigh the benefits of doing so. Furthermore, a weak ontology approach recognizes that rejecting new ontological commitments, as some postmodern and anti-essentialist views seek to do, is profoundly problematic.”

[Jennifer Mustapha, “An Analytical Survey of Critical Security Studies: Making the Case for a (Modified) Post-structuralist Approach.” Working paper number 53. York Consortium on International and Security Studies (YCISS). Toronto, Ontario. April, 2011. Pages 1-34.]

“Does the animal species contain within in it that which pushes each individual to act in a certain way because it is a dog or a cat or a squirrel, in the same way pomegranate seeds are intertwined due to being in a pomegranate and grew in such a manner because it is in its anatomical nature to do so, or is it such that in each animal there is something that actually and actively constitutes the organizing principle, of the aim, reason, and links between the different actions? In other words, are we dealing with a specific activity or an individual activity? What is the carrier of reason?” [Gilbert Simondon. Two Lessons on Animal and Man. Introduction by Jean-Yves Chateau. Drew S. Burk, translator. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal Publishing. 2011. Pages 79-80.]

“Individuated being is not substance but rather the putting into question of being, being through a problematic, divided, reunited, carried in this problematic, which sets itself up through it and causes it to become. Becoming is not the becoming of individuated being but the becoming of the individuation of being: what happens occurs in the form of a putting into question of being, in other words, in the form of the element of an open problematic, which is the individuation of resolved being: the individual is contemporary of its becoming for this becoming is its individuation; time itself is essence, not as development starting from an origin or tendency towards some end but, rather as resolute constitution of being.” [Gilbert Simondon translated and quoted by David Scott. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2014. Page 6.]

“… the contemporary usage of the term ‘culture’ is paradoxical: the word is employed to designate the result of direct action of man upon man, comparable to that of the gardener or breeder; it remains a question of techniques, techniques for constituting collective or individual habits, or training in the various prohibitions and choices that define a psycho-social personality.” [Gilbert Simondon, “Culture and technics (1965).” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 189, January/February 2015. Pages 17-23.]

“The actual evolution of technical objects does not happen in an absolutely continuous manner; it does not happen in an absolutely discontinuous manner either: it involves stages that are definable by the fact that they bring into being successive systems of coherence. There can be an evolution of a continuous kind between the stages that indicate structural reorganization; it results from improvements in detail resulting from what usage reveals and from the production of raw materials, or from better-adapted attachments. Over the past thirty years the automobile has been improving because of the use of metals better adapted to the conditions of its use, because of increased compression-ratios resulting from research into motor-fuels, and because of the study of the precise shape of cylinders and cylinder-heads in terms of the phenomenon of detonation. The problem of achieving combustion without detonation can only be solved by specific research into the cause of the sound wave inside a petrol mixture at different pressures and temperatures, using different volumes and starting from set points of ignition. But an attempt such as this does not lead to direct uses: the experimental work has still to be done and such trudging towards improvement has its own technicalnesa. The reforms in structure which allow the technical object to reveal its own specific character are the sheer essentials in the becoming of this object. Even if there were no scientific advances during a certain period of time, the progress of the technical object towards its own specificity could continue; the principle of progress is none other than the way in which the object causes and conditions itself in its operation and in the feed-back effect of its operation upon utilization. The technical object, the issue of an abstract work of organization of sub-sets, is the theatre of a number of relationships of reciprocal causalty.

“These relationships make it possible for the object to discover obstacles within its own operation on the basis of certain limits in the conditions of its use: in the incompatibilities that arise from the progressive saturation of the system of sub-sets there is discoverable an indefiniteness in limitations, and the transcending of these limitations is what constitutes progress.…

“These are conditions of individuation of a system.”

[Gilbert Simondon. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Ninian Mellamphy, translator. Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne. 1980. Pages 21-22.]

“While in his main thesis on ‘Individuation’ [Gilert] Simondon had sought to elaborate a general ontology describing the functional overlaying of material, biological, technical and psycho-social systems and their evolution, in ‘On the Mode,’ his analysis focused on the role of ‘technicity’ as a force of cognitive and, more broadly, cultural transformation intrinsic to tools, machines and technical assemblages. It is this implicit normativity of technics, its mediating capacity in the organization of the social system as a whole, that becomes alienated in a culture incapable of recognizing its own material conditions. As a ‘system of defence against technics,’ therefore, Simondon believes that culture turns blind, if not outright resistant, to this crucial site of psycho-social invention, reducing technology to a set of neutral instruments at the service of a technocratic will or as a monstrous non-human double fomenting technophobic reaction.” [Andrea Bardin and Giovanni Menegalle, “Introduction to Simondon.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 189, January/February 2015. Pages 15-16.]

“This paper aims to transcend this contradiction by analyzing participatory fora created in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Neither a personalistic conception of populism nor pure participatory democracy conform to the actual design and practices of Venezuelan participatory organizations. I propose a new framework, which I call participatory populism, for analyzing the role of participatory fora in the broader political strategy of Chávez’s movement.…

“Personalism emphasizes the unmediated connection of the masses and the leader as the primary source of support for populist regimes and would thus answer yes to the third and no to the others. Participatory democracy, which emphasizes bottom-up empowerment, would give the opposite answers. Participatory populism would answer affirmatively to all three.”

[Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, “Participatory Populism: Theory and Evidence from Bolivarian Venezuela.” Political Research Quarterly. Volume 68, number 3, September 2015. Pages 415-427.]

“Critical Paradigm, which is also known as The Third paradigm …, is concerned with emancipation and transformation …. [Norman] Denzin … captures this point by saying that ‘An emancipatory principle drives such research, which is committed to engaging oppressed groups in collective, democratic theorizing about their common and different perceptions of oppression and privilege’ …. The paradigm emerged out of the German intellectual traditions, and is linked to the works of the Frankfurt School during the 1930s. The paradigm is connected to many scholars like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, and Walter Benjamin. Many contemporary names are connected to the paradigm, the most well known of which is Jürgen Habermas.” [Rami F. Mustafa, “The P.O.E.Ms of Educational Research: A beginners’ Concise Guide.” International Education Studies. Volume 4, number 3, August 2011. Pages 23-30.]

“This book is about law and culture as major pillars in state-society relations. More accurately, it is about legal cultures in nonruling communities. To comprehend and examine communal legal cultures as key phenomena in politics, this book develops a concept that I call critical communitarianism. This revised version of communitarian theory conceives of nonruling communities in the context of the politics of identities, the plurality of legal orders, and state domination (often a violent form of domination legitimized through legal ideology). Critical communitarianism views nonruling communities as cultural foci of mobilization for, or resistance to, state law in the political context of state-society relations.” [Gad Barzilai. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor, Michigan: the University of Michigan Press. 2003. Page 1.]

“Critical communitarianism maintains that as a substantial component of communal power and identities law is pervasive and imminent …. Through identity practices, law generates, forms, and expresses human interests, expectations, desires, fears, and behavior. It also produces a sense of political belonging and, alternatively, of political alienation. Thus, many facets of human life are meaningless without communities. Communities largely construct identities, and our personalities are partially embedded in them ….” [Gad Barzilai. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor, Michigan: the University of Michigan Press. 2003. Page 43.]

“… I have explained why the dichotomy of ‘individual’ vs. ‘community’ may be very problematic, and that a critical communitarian perspective does encourage symbiotic relationships between states, individuals, and communities.” [Gad Barzilai, “Beyond Relativism: Where is Political Power in Legal Pluralism?” Theoretical Inquiries in Law. Volume 9, number 2, July 2008. Pages 395-416.]

“My analysis of the legal culture of feminists entails the need for feminist communitarianism. Feminist communitarianism is not an oxymoron. Feminists and communitarians have ascribed significance to social reciprocity and criticize the private-public dichotomy while underscoring a contextually embedded self …. Yet, nonfeminist communitarians have neglected gender equality for the same reasons that many other (male) political theorists have downplayed the predicament of women, as a reflection of maledomination in human epistemology and philosophy …. The importance that communitarians have attributed to communal public good has not by itself rendered a nonfeminist conception of social relations, culture, law, and politics.” [Gad Barzilai. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor, Michigan: the University of Michigan Press. 2003. Page 147.]

“… I propose an emancipatory communitarian approach for psychological discourse and action. The approach I suggest draws primarily from communitarian philosophies and from liberation theories. Although communitarianism complements other orientations well, it has certain weaknesses that are addressed best by theories of emancipation.…

“The practice of an emancipatory communitarian approach would examine the role of oppression and lack of responsibility toward people in positions of disadvantage. In Latin America, psychologists working within the tradition of liberation psychology best exemplify the notion of social responsibility …. Committed to service to poor people and disenfranchised people, they promote in the community the values of compassion, collaboration, and justice in ways unknown to most psychologists in postindustrial societies.…

“Emancipatory communitarianism is not a universal or timeless panacea, however. Societies with strong communitarian traditions … are known to have suppressed individual uniqueness.”

[Isaac Prilleltensky, “Values, Assumptions, and Practices: Assessing the Moral Implications of Psychological Discourse and Action.” American Psychologist. Volume 52, number 5, May 1997. Pages 517-535.]

“Emancipatory Communitarianism (EC) was first conceptualized by [Isaac] Prilleltensky … to balance and combine the strengths of liberation psychology … and communitarianism …. As liberation psychology stresses the rights of individuals and groups, communitarianism insists upon responsibilities to one another in the larger community …. In practice, EC promotes critical consciousness, a strengths orientation, self-determination, communal responsibility, and advocacy …. Power dynamics are leveled in the counseling relationship and communal values are honored over individualism …. Unlike traditional theoretical approaches, EC favors the poor and disadvantaged, as it strives for distributive justice when working directly with clients and when advocating in political and social venues.” [Michael D. Brubaker, Michael Tlanusta Garrett, Edil Torres Rivera, and Kevin A. Tate, “Justice Making in Groups for Homeless Adults: The Emancipatory Communitarian Way.” The Journal for Specialists in Group Work. Volume 35, number 2, June 2010. Pages 124-133.]

“The Regeneración (MP3 audio file) Childcare Collective is committed to growing an intergenerational movement for collective liberation, in which people of all ages can participate, learn from each other, take care of each other, and dramatically reshape the conditions of their lives. Since 2005, Regeneración has built relationships with and between domestic workers, immigrant families, families facing detention, queer families organizing for racial and economic justice, and radical parents and caretakers; we’ve sent delegations to the U.S. Social Forum, facilitated a children’s program at the Critical Resistance 10 conference, and been in dialogue with radical childcare providers across the country; we’ve occupied cafeterias in New York City, swung on swingsets in Detroit, and played hide-and-go-seek in Oakland.

“As we did all this, we discovered an incredible secret: the walls that constrain our everyday lives are riven with fissures, tears and holes. The holes are hard to spot, but once we notice them, they nourish us with a powerful magic. We can peer through them and see realities that exist right now, inside this world and inside of ourselves—magical realities in which people fashion their world together, everyone feels respected and loved, and people are responsible to one another and to a collective vision. The more we practice our magic, the more we’re able to notice these holes, tug at their edges, and begin stepping through them into what awaits us. Here are some pieces of the magic we’ve practiced so far. Use them wisely.”

[Regeneración Childcare Collective, “The Regeneration Manifesto.” The Commoner: A Web Journal for Other Values. Issue 15, winter 2012. Pages 396-400.]

“A Critical Theory of Creativity argues that a Utopian drive is aesthetically encoded within the language of form. Combining multidisciplinary theory with case studies ranging from planned communities to the relationship between Navajo theology and design, this book demonstrates how humankind is striving to fashion a better world from the raw materials we inherit. Building upon the work of Ernst Bloch, Howells sees the ‘fall’ as a liberation and Prometheus as a hero. He takes religion seriously as a cultural narrative, but replaces divine creation with human creativity. Coupled with this liberation from Eden comes a very human obligation that cannot be delegated to God, to nature or to market forces. A Critical Theory of Creativity’s intellectual compass ranges from Roger Fry to Philip Pullman and Slavoj Žižek, returning always to an empowering, human-centred universe. As Bloch declared in The Spirit of Utopia, ‘Life has been put into our hands.’” [Richard Howells. A Critical Theory of Creativity: Utopia, Aesthetics, Atheism and Design. Abstract. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2015.]

“With the politicization of crime functioning to distract the public from politically dangerous issues (such as poverty), we can see [William J.] Chambliss’ project [in his ‘Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law and Law Enforcement’] as a critical theory of the police. His societal-level analysis is analogous to critical theories of popular culture. Just as prime-time television interpellates us toward consumerism, the crime industry invites us to believe that young nonwhite men are synonymous with crime …. The false consciousness of the crime industry distracts us from our own subordination, and inscribes young, nonwhite men as criminals.” [Paul J. Kaplan, “Looking Through the Gaps: A Critical Approach to the LAPD’s Rampart Scandal.” Social Justice. Volume 36, number 1, 2009. Pages 61-81.]

“You hold in your hands the first textbook written on the fairly new academic discipline known as liberative ethics. To accomplish this goal, it was written from the perspective of different marginalized communities. This is not to say that this is the first time these perspectives have been voiced or presented in written form. Obviously, those who both originaly and through the generations have participated in the practice of liberation theology—congregants, clergy, and scholars—were also engaged in critical reflection. In true fashion of the liberationist model, this book merely attempts to put into writing that which has become normative, over decades, among communities experiencing dispossesion and disenfranchisement. Reflection on theology concepts makes no sense if it fails to be contextualized in the everyday lives of the marginalized and seriously considers their hopes and struggles for liberation. Following the lead of those relegated to the underside of history, this book attempts to reflect the praxis—the actions—that the oppressed of the world are employing as they seek their own liberation. What makes this work unique is that until now within the academy, a textbook dedicated solely to liberative ethics from multiple global perspectives, inclusive of US marginalized voices, has not existed.” [Miguel A. De La Torre, “Preface.” Ethics: A Liberative Approach. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press imprint of Augsburg Fortress. 2013. Page xi.]

“Asé is a concept from the Yoruba language/tradition that signifies the life force that manifests all things. It is often used as a means of offering affirmation, and it is commonly translated as ‘so let it be.’ Asé acts as a way for one to co-sign or reaffirm one’s own or another’s claim about what is possible. Our use of the term in the title of this essay is a recognition of the collective epistemological power that is present in the exchange of stories. Not only do we affirm the value of such exchanges between ourselves and with our research participants; we also acknowledge the importance of making visible black queer folks’ abilities to speak to and learn from ourselves. This, we believe, is a challenge to the constant signifying that happens on black lives and that is continually written onto black bodies.…

“Ethics need not be so hegemonic and discursive that it is unresponsive, stationary, and irrelevant to situated human experiences and personhoods. Fortunately, another consequence of the union between theory/theology and praxis in ethics is a responsive and liberative ethics. At the very center of praxis is the notion that practice learns from thinking/feeling, and thinking/feeling subsequently learns from practice. As ethics bridges this process with the theoretical and theological foundations that inform it, the result is ethical discourse and practice that is responsive.”

[Thelathia N. Young and Shannon J. Miller, “Asé and Amen, Sister: Black Feminist Scholars Engage in Interdisciplinary, Dialogical, Transformative Ethical Praxis.” Journal of Religious Ethics. Volume 43, issue 2, June 2015. Pages 289-316.]

“Black liberation and womanist theologies emerged as a way of rethinking and reformulating the Christian gospel to make possible a new vision of events that foregrounded, as necessary, a commitment to the poor and participation in their struggles, as taught by Jesus himself. It allowed Christians in North America to protest social evils and religiously affirm revolutionary changes that were taking place in the United States at the end of the sixties. This theological task was essential in fashioning norms and values that could inform the consitruction of a liberative ethics.” [Keri Day, “Global Economics and US Public Policy: Human Liberation for the Global Poor.” Black Theology: An International Journal. Volume 9, issue 1, April 2011. Pages 9-33.]

“In this article, I argue, that proponents of the notion of agency have failed to produce a satisfactory response to the question of how critical theory should approach the issue of social construction. The problem stems from the fact that agency is often presented as a new form of causality which could account for social change, a means for explaining social change, rather than as a means to specify the significance of social change. This difference is subtle but fundamental to the project of critical theory, since it is one thing to stress that institutions and/or discourses are socially constructed but another to define what exactly is being constructed. Hence, coming to terms with the issue of social construction is not simply a matter of focusing on the social context to explain international dynamics. Rather, the challenge consists in grasping the historical significance of social institutions and discourses. It consists in problematising what is taken for granted, since critical theorists are themselves conditioned by their own social context.” [Samuel Knafo, “Critical Approaches and the Problem of Social Construction: Reassessing the Legacy of the Agent/Structure Debate in IR.” Working paper number 3. The Centre for Global Political Economy. The University of Sussex. Brighton, England. June 2008. Pages 1-29.]

“Large peripheral slums, especially in Africa, are usually complex quiltworks of kin networks, tenure systems, and tenant relationships. Diana Lee-Smith, one of the founders of Nairobi’s Mazingira Institute, has closely studied Korogocho, a huge slum on the eastern edge of the city. Korogocho includes seven villages offering a menu of different housing and rental types. The most wretched village, Grogan, consists of one-room cardboard shacks and is largely populated by femaleheaded households evicted from an older shantytown near the city center. Barracks-like Githaa, on the other hand, ‘is an entirely speculative village, built by entrepreneurs for rent,’ despite the fact that the land is publicly owned Nearby Dandora is a sites-and-services scheme where half the owners are now absentee landlords. Lee-Smith emphasizes that petty landlordship and subletting are major wealth strategies of the poor, and that homeowners quickly become exploiters of even i more impoverished people. Despite the persistent heroic image of the squatter as self-builder and owner-occupier, the reality in Korogocho and other Nairobi slums is the irresistible increase in tenancy and petty exploitation.” [Mike Davis. Planet of Slums. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2006. Page 44.]

“Since as early as the 1980s, rhetoricians have theorized the diverse, intersectional, and multimodal qualities of contemporary rhetoric by documenting, observing, participating in, and analyzing forms of in situ [Latin, in sitū, in the original position, place, or situation] rhetoric. Expanding from a traditional focus on analyzing already documented texts (i.e., speech transcripts, photographs, films, newspaper articles), growing numbers of rhetoricians interested in in situ rhetoric privilege ‘being there’ to experience rhetorical performance as it happens in communities …. Engaging in rhetorical fieldwork, they travel to places where rhetoric happens, speak to people who co-produce and co-experience it, and record their impressions.” [Danielle Endres, Aaron Hess, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Michael K. Middleton, “In Situ Rhetoric: Intersections Between Qualitative Inquiry, Fieldwork, and Rhetoric.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 16, number 6, December 2016. Pages 511-524.]

“This article presents a Faith-Based Accountability Mechanism typology that outlines a set of attributes for an exercise of religious soft power that might strengthen the democratic process in global governance. A coalition service model that preserves the public trust in appropriate contexts is developed in contrast to monopolistic religious surveillance models. The typology is illustrated with case study data from the 2011 Interfaith Summit in Bordeaux, France.…

“… I propose 10 attributes of a Faith-Based Accountability Mechanism (FAM) addressing questions about when, where, how, and under what conditions religious soft power might strengthen the democratic legitimacy of global governance.…

“… In this article, I explored the theoretical ‘black box’ associated with the political–religious nexus using existing theory to identify a FAM framed as service rather than surveillance. I illustrated 10 attributes of this typology using data from the 2011 Interfaith Summit.”

[Sherrie Steiner, “Faith-Based Accountability Mechanism Typology: The 2011 Interfaith Summit As Soft Power in Global Governance.” Sage OPEN. April–June 2012. Pages 1-15.]

“Within a matter of a few years, in all the advanced societies, employers, international officials, high-ranking civil servants, media intellectuals and high-flying journalists have all started to voice a strange Newspeak. Its vocabulary, which seems to have sprung out of nowhere, is now on everyone’s lips: ‘globalization’ and ‘flexibility,’ ‘governance’ and ‘employability,’ ‘underclass’ and ‘exclusion,’ ‘new economy’ and ‘zero tolerance,’ ‘communitarianism’ and ‘multiculturalism ,’ not to mention their so-called postmodern cousins, ‘minority,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘identity,’ ‘fragmentation,’ and so on. The diffusion of this new planetary vulgate – from which the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘domination’ and ‘inequality’ are conspicuous by their absence, having been peremptorily dismissed under the pretext that they are obsolete and non-pertinent – is the result of a new type of imperialism. Its effects are all the more powerful and pernicious in that it is promoted not only by the partisans of the neoliberal revolution who, under cover of ‘modernization,’ intend to remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles, henceforth depicted as so many archaisms and obstacles to the emergent new order, but also by cultural producers (researchers, writers and artists) and left-wing activists, the vast majority of whom still think of themselves as progressives.” [Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 105, January/February 2001. Pages 2-5.]

“Put tersely, carnal sociology is a sociology not of the body as sociocultural object but from the body as fount of social intelligence and sociological acumen. It starts from the brute fact that, as argued above, the human agent is a sentient and suffering being of flesh and blood.… Carnal sociology strives to eschew the spectatorial viewpoint and to grasp action-in-the-making, not action-already-accomplished. It aims to detect and document the deployment of the practical schemata that fashion practice: the cognitive, conative, and affective building blocks of habitus, whose layering and operations are fully open to empirical investigation ….

“Carnal sociology applies to any object and can use a variety of methods so long as these treat the social agent as embodied and embedded.…

“Carnal sociology is premised on a syllogism and a dare. The syllogism is the following: if it is true that the body is not just a socially construct-ed product but also a socially construc-ting vector of knowledge, practice, and power, then this applies to the body of the sociologist as inquirer.”

[Loïc Wacquant, “For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood.” Qualitative Sociology. Volume 28, number 1, March 2015. Pages 1-11.]

“… this approach [carnal sociology] takes seriously the embarrassing fact that social agents are motile, sensuous, and suffering creatures of flesh, blood, nerves and sinews doomed to death, who know it and make their world through and with their enskilled and exposed ‘mindful bodies’ …. And it insists that this proposition applies to the sociologist no less than to the people she studies, be they muay thai boxers, lathe operators, school teachers or corporate lawyers.

“Carnal sociology is based on a bet (or a dare): that we can turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge.”

[Loïc Wacquant, “Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus.” Body & Society. Volume 20, number 2, June 2014. Pages 3-17.]

“… the very purpose of enactive ethnography is to submit oneself to the special social gravity and sensual magnetism of the phenomenon, precisely to provoke those changes and use them as crucial data points recorded with one’s own flesh and blood. The carnal sociologist knows full well that she will not emerge the same at the other end of the experiment and she intuits that this coming self-transformation is not without risks and costs. But such is the wondrous potency of libido scientifica [Latin, libīdō scientifica, ‘scientific libido’] – for those who possess it or are possessed by it – that she will throw herself body and soul into the work.” [Loïc Wacquant, “Putting Habitus in its Place: Rejoinder to the Symposium.” Body & Society. Volume 20, number 2, June 2014. Pages 118-139.]

“A carnal sociology that seeks to situate itself not outside or above practice but at its ‘point of production’ requires that we immerse ourselves as deeply and as durably as possible into the cosmos under examination; that we submit ourselves to its specific temporality and contingencies; that we acquire the embodied dispositions it demands and nurtures, so that we may grasp it via the prethetic understanding that defines the native relation to that world—not as one world among many but as ‘home’ ….” [Loïc Wacquant, “Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership.” Qualitative Sociology. Volume 28, number 1, winter 2005. Pages 445-474.]

“[Loïc] Wacquant’s account of carnal sociology offers a vision that is profoundly, rather than superficially, embodied. He gives a highly persuasive depiction of bodily practice as generative of meaning, a view buttressed by his ethnographic work. He makes disciplinary border crossings, toward naturalized philosophy and neurocognitive thought, to find resources for thinking carnally. Sociologists of the body (not to mention feminists across the disciplines …) have expressed a similar call for a deeper, more fleshly grasp of embodiment, and a more embodied sense of sociality. They have described various features of embodiment— including the phenomenal …, the elusory and affective …, and the sociomaterial and biopolitical …—to get at aspects of sociality that cannot be addressed through discourse or cultural inscription alone. Many sociologists, though, have been circumspect about drawing from biological, and specifically neurobiological, paradigms …. Nonetheless, Wacquant’s move resonates with broadly aired concerns about the limits of social constructionism, with its nature/culture dualisms, de-fleshed sense of the body-subject, and its tendency towards anti- (rather than merely critical) empiricism …. It is also compatible with the post-genomic thinking of biological matter as agentic, dynamic and flexible, and (in the case of humans at least), as inextricably social.” [Victoria Pitts-Taylor, “A Feminist Carnal Sociology?: Embodiment in Sociology, Feminism, and Naturalized Philosophy.” Qualitative Sociology. Volume 28, number 1, March 2015. Pages 19-25.]

“In this article, I put forth two interconnected theses, the first historical, replacing the carceral institution in the full arc of ethnoracial division and domination in the United States, the second institutional, explaining the astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades as a result of the obsolescence of the ghetto as a device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled) African Americans ‘in their place,’ i.e. in a subordinate and confined position in physical, social, and symbolic space. I further argue that, in the post-Civil Rights era, the remnants of the dark ghetto and the fast-expanding carceral system of the United States have become tightly linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion.” [Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment & Society. Volume 3, number 1, January 2001. Pages 95-133.]

“Whatever the modalities of their advent, it is indisputable that the linked stinginess of the welfare wing and munificence of the penal wing under the guidance of moralism have altered the makeup of the bureaucratic field in ways that are profoundly injurious to democratic ideals. As their sights converge onto the same marginal populations and territories, deterrent workfare and the neutralizing prison foster vastly different profiles and experiences of citizenship across the class and ethnic spectrum. They not only contravene the fundamental principle of equality of treatment by the state and routinely abridge the individual freedoms of the dispossessed. They also undermine the consent of the governed through the aggressive deployment of involuntary programs stipulating personal responsibilities just as the state is withdrawing the institutional supports necessary to shoulder these and shirking its own social and economic charges. And they stamp the precarious fractions of the proletariat from which public aid recipients and convicts issue with the indelible seal of unworthiness. In short, the penalization of poverty splinters citizenship along class lines, saps civic trust at the bottom, and sows the degradation of republican tenets. The establishment of the new government of social insecurity discloses, in fine, that neoliberalism is constitutively corrosive of democracy.” [Loïc Wacquant. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Insecurity. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2009. Page 313.]

“Not crime, but the need to shore up an eroding caste cleavage, along with buttressing the emergent regime of desocialized wage labour to which most blacks are fated by virtue of their lack of marketable cultural capital, and which the most deprived among them resist by escaping into the illegal street economy, is the main impetus behind the stupendous expansion of America’s penal state in the post-Keynesian age and its de facto policy of ‘carceral affirmative action’ towards African-Americans.” [Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US.” New Left Review. Series II, number 13, January–February 2002. Pages 41-60.]

“… recent developments on both the labor, welfare, and criminal justice front suggest that Spain presents a very interesting case to study and think through, so as to further specify the mechanisms, dimensions, and pathways of the ongoing drift toward the penal regulation of marginality in the dualizing city as well as choice materials for probing the broader reengineering of the state to which this drift contributes.” [Loïc Wacquant, “Neoliberal penality at work: a response to my Spanish critics.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. Number 15, 2011. Pages 115-123.]

“Viewed against the backdrop of the full historical trajectory of racial domination in the United States, the glaring and growing ‘disproportionality’ in incarceration that has afflicted African-Americans over the past three decades can be understood as the result of the ‘extra-penological’ functions that the prison system has come to shoulder in the wake of the crisis of the ghetto. Not crime, but the need to shore up an eroding caste cleavage, along with buttressing the emergent regime of desocialized wage labor to which most blacks are fated by virtue of their lack of marketable cultural capital, and which the most deprived among them resist by escaping into the illegal street economy, is the main impetus behind the stupendous expansion of America’s penal state in the post-Keynesian age and its de facto policy of ‘carceral affirmative action’ toward African-Americans ….” [Loïc Wacquant, “The new ‘peculiar institution’: On the prison as surrogate ghetto.” Theoretical Criminology. Volume 4, number 3, August 2000. Pages 377-389.]

“… the American society of the post-Fordist and post-Keynesian era, the world’s only superpower and symbolic Mecca. This is a society characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the ‘shareholder-value’ conception of the firm, and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic activity.” [Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 105, January/February 2001. Pages 2-5.]

“My point is that the food regime concept is a key to unlock not only structured moments and transitions in the history of capitalist food relations, but also the history of capitalism itself. It is not about food per se, but about the relations within which food is produced, and through which capitalism is produced and reproduced. As such, the food regime is an optic on the multiple determinations embodied in the food commodity, refocusing from the food commodity as object to the commodity as relation, with definite geo-political, social, cultural, ecological, and nutritional relations at significant historical moments ….” [Philip McMichael, “A food regime analysis of the ‘world food crisis.’” Agriculture and Human Values. Volume 26, number 4, December 2009. Pages 281-295.]

“In this essay I explore the likely contours of a future system of international production and trade of agro-food products by examining the character of two past international food regimes, and the forces shaping a possible third regime. The essential features of a food regime are found in the characteristics of large-scale food production and consumption, and their relation to the organization of the state system. A food regime includes the norms or rules governing international agro-food transactions, thus reflecting the concern with normative factors found in the ‘international regimes’ literature …. However, the analysis of food regimes departs from much of that literature by giving greater attention to structural factors such as the organization of agro-food capital and the state system.” [Philip McMichael, “Tensions between National and International Control of the World Food Order: Contours of a New Food Regime.” Sociological Perspectives. Volume 35, number 2, summer 1992. Pages 343-365.]

“Political management of surpluses underwrote the post-Second World War food regime. It restored and stabilized metropolitan agro-industrial complexes, and incorporated Third World states and consumers within concessional circuits of food aid …. That is, the food regime was a political construct, managed by states across the north/south divide. The transitory character of this food regime derived from the contradictory national and international movements around which it was constructed.” [Philip McMichael, “Rethinking Globalization: The Agrarian Question Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy. Volume 4, number 4, winter 1997. Pages 630-662.]

“The Japan-centered East Asian import complex emerged as a consequence of the postwar food regime, and as a consequence of its collapse. Just as the postwar food regime was centered in the political management of US food surpluses, so an emerging food regime may center on a food import complex such as that forming in East Asia. The postwar food regime grew out of the need to dispose of the surpluses arising from an overproduction of agricultural products stimulated by US government policy (notably, various subsidized commodity programs devised to stabilize the US farm sector).” [Philip McMichael, “A Global Interpretation of the Rise of the East Asian Food Import Complex.” World Development. Volume 28, number 3, March 2000. Pages 409-424.]

“The food crisis, embedded as it is in the global energy crisis, is symptomatic of the neo-liberal food regime and its ‘petro-farming’ foundation (fossil-fuel dependence on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, mechanization and food transport). The ‘new agriculture,’ while acknowledging the need for ecological accounting, nevertheless proceeds from this model. Ecological accounting includes mandated and subsidized emissions targets, spawning the agrofuel industry as an alternative to fossil fuels.” [Philip McMichael, “Banking on Agriculture: A Review of the World Development Report 2008.” Journal of Agrarian Change. Volume 9, number 2, April 2009. Pages 235-246.]

“… power and property are not sufficient for a food regime analysis. Are tensions stabilized? What institutions provide the pivot and give meaning to a stable constellation of relationships? For instance, is there a counterpart in a financialized food regime to food aid as a pivot of the 1947–73 food regime? Legitimacy of food aid depended on both of the following: (1) convergent interests and expectations among diverse and highly unequal actors, including US farm commodity groups and legislators, Third World governments, grain trading corporations, consumers who benefited from falling grain and meat prices; and (2) an ideological framework that defined these as humanitarian, developmental, or anything but a trade relation, even though the scale of food aid shipments dominated world price formation for three decades ….” [Harriet Friedmann, “Discussion: moving food regimes forward: reflections on symposium essays.” Agriculture and Human Values. Volume 26, number 4, December 2009. Pages 335-344.]

“The impasse in international economic relations is centred on agriculture because in the agrofood sector there exists the largest gap between national regulation and transnational economic organization. This gap is the legacy of the post-World War II food regime, the rule-governed structure of production and consumption of food on a world scale. The food regime was created in 1947 when alternative international regulation in the form of the proposal for a World Food Board was rejected. At the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], the only clear positions are those which ‘decouple’ and ‘deregulate’ elements of a food regime that no longer works. The present alternatives for a new regime are not formally proposed. They must be teased out from analyses of the social forces involved in global agrofood restructuring.” [Harriet Friedmann, “The Political Economy of Food: a Global Crisis.” New Left Review. Series I, number 197, January–February 1993. Pages 29-57.]

“During the food regime, intensive livestock production was a pre-eminently national sector, first in the USA, then in Europe and other advanced capitalist countries. Yet it shared with the industry of the period a deeper process of transnational, intrasectoral integration. Like automobiles or aircraft—in which multiple components produced in different factories, and in different national economies, came to be linked by transnational corporations as direct subsidiaries or through subcontracts—the specialised livestock sector was connected, via the transnational feedstuffs industry, to specialised crop farmers.” [Harriet Friedmann, “Distance and Durability: Shaky Foundations of the World Food Economy.” Third World Quarterly. Volume 13, number 2 1992. Pages 371-383.]

“[Harriett] Friedmann and [Philip[ McMichael identified two past food regimes, and suggested that we were in transition to a third. The characteristics of this third regime were still unfolding, but it was most frequently articulated as a corporate-friendly international regulatory regime that some consider crippling to state autonomy. Predictions that the internationalization of the regulatory regime and the state-initiated institutionalization of corporate rights will be key features of the third food regime have proven durable. Therefore, contrary to the optimism of free-trade proponents, the neoliberal regime is primed to extend and entrench existing inequalities between nation–states.” [Gabriela Pechlaner and Gerardo Otero, “The Neoliberal Food Regime: Neoregulation and the New Division of Labor in North America.” Rural Sociology. Volume 75, number 2, 2010. Pages 179-208.]

“This article uses the concept of food regimes to interrogate whether there are any grounds for hope that we might one day achieve a more sustainable set of ecological relations that can operate in a stable form and at a global scale. In its early iterations, Food Regimes Theory (FRT) provided a compelling alternative to the rather linear and deterministic narratives of agricultural change that characterized the ‘New Rural Sociology’ …. While Food Regimes Theory dwelt on some pessimistic subject matter—the collapse of colonial food systems, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and the deceptive logic of the post-WWII Aid initiatives—it nonetheless established the grounds by which key sets of food relationships might be reconfigured in dramatically changed form. In short, it broke out of the linear history of food industrialization, and opened the space for alternative visions of our food futures.” [Hugh Campbell, “Breaking new ground in food regime theory: corporate environmentalism, ecological feedbacks and the ‘food from somewhere’ regime?” Agriculture and Human Values. Volume 26, number 4, December 2009. Pages 309-319.]

“… a re-commoning of food would certainly open up the prospect of a transition towards a new food regime in which the several food dimensions are properly valued and primacy rests in its absolute need for human beings. But in order to move in this direction, the very foundations of how economics and social sciences perceive foods and foodstuff have to be reassessed. The following sections aim to show how rivalry and excludability, the features used by the economic school to define private/public/common goods, are just social constructs and not ontological properties of goods. Then, using the food regime theory, discussion moves to some current developments in the industrial food system (mainstream) and innovative niches (urban alternative food networks and rural food sovereignty movement), proposing a transition pathway towards a new model: the food commons regime.” [Jose Luis Vivero Pol, “Transition towards a food commons regime: re-commoning food to crowd-feed the world.“ Presented at Cross-disciplinary issues for food governance, the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research. Montreal, Quebec. August, 2015. Pages 1-33. Retrieved on December 21st, 2016.]

“From a utilitarian point of view, food as a global commons could be thought of as ‘the greatest possible amount for the greatest possible number of individuals,’ what is commonly coined in marketing terms as ‘enough food for all.’ From the legal point of view, and using the fundamental right to be free from hunger, the least consideration of food as a global common could be translated into the minimum amount of food for the maximum amount of people, considering the minimum a quantity that prevents from suffering hunger, although not the ideal in quantity and quality to be considered food secure. The food-provided caloric requirements are unique for each person, depending on his body needs, physical activity, weather conditions and ethnic considerations, but these requirements are also absolute: they cannot either be negotiated with our body nor vary depending of the relative abundance of food.” [Jose Luis Vivero Pol, “Food as a commons: Reframing the narrative of the food system.” SSRN Electronic Journal. April, 2013. Pages 1-28.]

“The findings reveal some fundamental changes that occurred in structural relations, in ways suggesting sustained change, both within and beyond the communities in which the projects were based. The features of altered social relations indicate a social resilience (evoked in the presence of the ‘threat’ of chronic disadvantage), which can be transformative. The sustainability of the social resilience evoked is supported by anecdotal evidence indicating the structural changes that have occurred in these two communities and which critical social theory predicts lead to sustained change …. Longitudinal research is currently underway to provide the practice evidence that the changes observed have been sustained in both communities.

“The features of social resilience from the young people’s perspective, which emerged as significant from this research, are thus agency, power and being authors of one’s own solution, nontotalising identities, civic connection, public space, respect and trust, as well as hope.”

[Natalie Bolzan and Fran Gale, “Social resilience: Transformation in two Australian communities facing chronic adversity.” International Social Work. OnlineFirst edition. November, 2016. Pages 1-14.]

“A post-left professoriat has arisen out of the ashes of the New Left student movement of the 1960s. It is a strange phenomenon in the midst of the Reaganite conservatism of the 1980s. Faced with a choice of career after the rigor mortis of the New Left, many of its former activists and sympathizers chose to get advanced degrees and ascend the academic ladder to professorships in the universities. By now a good many have gained tenure and many more are on their way. The New Left is dead, and yet it is very much alive in the very places where it was born.…

“… The professional rewards have not been without some political compensations. They have taken the peculiar form of a minor academic industry devoted to the history of the American Communist Party. Books and dissertations have proliferated on this subject in recent years, after a long interval of virtual neglect. Instead of making sense of their own experience by confronting it directly, these post-New Left professors seem to want to make sense of it through the medium of an earlier generation. They have evidently turned back to the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s because they are unwilling or unable to face up to their own political history. They have made the substitution as if it enabled them to feel that they are still keeping the faith by some mysterious process of political transference.”

[Theodore Draper, “The class struggle: The myth of the Communist professors.” The New Republic (pre-1988). Volume 196, number 004, January 1987. Pages 29-36.]

“All the principles of heaven and earth arc living inside you. Life itself is the truth, and this will never change. Everything in heaven and earth breathes. Breath is the thread that ties creation together. When the myriad variations in the universal breath can be sensed, the individual techniques of the Art of Peace are born.

“Consider the ebb and flow of the tide. When waves come to strike the shore, they crest and fall, creating a sound. Your breath should follow the same pattern, absorbing the entire universe in your belly with each inhalation. Know that we all have access to four treasures: the energy of the sun and moon, the breath of heaven, the breath of earth, and the ebb and flow of the tide.

“Those who practice the Art of Peace must protect the domain of Mother Nature, the divine reflection of creation, and keep it lovely and fresh. Warriorship gives birth to natural beauty. The subtle techniques of a warrior arise as naturally as the appearance of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Warriorship is none other than the vitality that sustains all life.

“When life is victorious, there is birth; when it is thwarted, there is death. A warrior is always engaged in a life-and-death struggle for Peace.

“Contemplate the workings of this world, listen to the words of the wise, and take all that is good as your own. With this as your base, open your own door to truth. Do not overlook the truth that is right before you. Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people, Everything—even mountains, rivers, plants, and trees—should be your teacher.”

[Morihei Ueshiba. The Art of Peace. John Stevens, translator. Boston, Massachusetts, and London: Shambhala. 1992. Pages 21-24.]

“There is no enemy in Aikido. It is wrong to think that having an opponent or an enemy, or trying to be stronger than him and trying to overpower him is true budo. True Budo [Buddha] has no opponent, True Budo has no enemy. True Budo is to become one with the universe. The purpose of Aikido practice is not to become strong, nor is it to fell an opponent. Rather, it is necessary to have one’s heart at the center of the universe, then as little as it may be, help maintain peace among the peoples of the earth. Aikido is both like a compass that enables each person to realize his own individual destiny, as well as a way of unity and love.

“At anywhere, at anytime, no matter how anyone may attack me, I have no fear, for I have left everything in the hands of God. This is not just when holding a sword, but always; for one must have a heart that clings neither to life nor death, but rather one that leaves things in the hands of the Creator.…

“Whenever I am asked about my hopes for those who are applying themselves to the austere training of Aikido, I must answer that I would like them all to scrutinize well the circumstances of the world from beginning to end, to listen well to the words of men, and then to take that which is best and make it a part of themselves. Then with this foundation they must go forward and open the gate of the self.…

“Within the subtle variations and flux of the universe there are spring, summer, autumn and winter, just as we humans feel joy or anger, love and pleasure. As much as possible we must diligently work so that second by second the eternal fluctuations of the universe become the same, a continuum.… [A]ll the laws of the universe have a single root or origin, the great workings of which are the Universal Truth. Those who would train in Aikido should research deeply the functions of this original, unitary principle, and so imbibe Universal Truth; in other words to become more and more like the spirit of loving protection of all things which is something that never misses being aware of anything.”

[Morihei Ueshiba, “Aikido: Memoirs of Morihei Ueshiba O Sensei.” Aiki News. Winter, 1992. Pages 1-64.]

“Strength has more to do with intention than with the size of your biceps. It has more to do with your spirit and your energy flow than with the number of push-ups you can do. Aikido is the distillation of [Morihei] Ueshiba’s vision and appreciation of what actually happens in nature. In hundreds of dojos (practice halls) across the world, Aikidoists are daily proving that a unified intention can accept and redirect the most awesome brute strength. It may be hard to accept, but it is a fact that a single reed can pierce a solid oak when blown with the force of a typhoon. You need only think of this image to appreciate the strength of a unified intention.…

“… paradoxically, we are writing a book about harmony. Our goal is to help you achieve balance and harmony through the resolution of conflict. Remember, however, that harmony is inextricably bound up with the conflict from which it sprang. You may never find that tranquil beachafter all, the sand upon which you lie is the result of the conflict of rock and water against rock—but you need not be afraid to face your struggles. ‘Growing up,’ as a wise person once said, ‘is not for sissies.’”

[Terry Dobson and Victor Miller. Aikido in Everyday Life: Giving in to Get Your Way. Berkekey, California: Blue Snake Books imprint of North Atlantic Books. 1993. Pages xiv-xv.]

“… I use a dance rather than a martial metaphor to narrate … [an aikido] encounter and bring to light its key features in a way that will free the reader of the images, thoughts, and feelings associated with war. Dialogue or discovery metaphors would also have presented alternative cognitive and interpretative ensembles and, as such, also would have achieved my goal. You dance aikido to a ternary rhythm pattern, staying centered throughout the movement. From a position of centeredness, you connect with your partner. Then, staying centered, you channel the energy that your partner offers you. Finally, maintaining a strong center, you conclude the interaction.” [Philippe Martin, “Conflict Resolution Using Transactional Analysis and Aikido.” Transactional Analysis Journal. Volume 34, number 3, July 2004. Pages 229-242.]

“… some miscommunication occurs as a result of creating meaning based on preconceived notions and past experiences. Awareness of these biases helps entrepreneurs develop more openness to new perspectives. The Japanese martial art of Aikido offers a way to enhance awareness by focusing on mind–body coordination. In addition, it serves as a metaphoric vehicle for pedagogically enhancing communication effectiveness, particularly in entrepreneurial settings with high stress or conflict.” [Kay C. A. Rudisill, “Aikido Practices, Communication Awareness and Effective Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Human Values. Volume 13, number 1, April 2007. Pages 35-42.]

“Although we have no empirical data that says ‘people who have completed a two hour introductory session in aikido make better leaders than those who haven’t,’ we do have the anecdotal feedback of our participants who are outright enthusiastic. … In both our experience and in the comments of our students, we see powerful parallels between the principles and practice of aikido and the principles and practice of effective leadership.” [James G. Clawson and Jonathan Doner, “Teaching Leadership through Aikido.” Journal of Management Education. Volume 20, number 2, May 1996. Pages 182-205.]

“The synergy that I experience from the juxtaposition of the teaching of qualitative methods and the teaching of the Martial Arts – specifically aikidō – emerges from what I believe these two artful disciplines, and their habitus, share. My first point concerns appreciating both aikidō and qualitative inquiry as Arts (with a capital A), with developed senses of embodiment and aesthetic pleasures. Though perhaps not as developed as it should, viewing qualitative research and inquiry as art, is a leitmotif [underlying theme] running through the field’s development …. It is a position propelled by emancipatory humanistic approaches to qualitative inquiry, which emphasize the ‘social’ over the ‘science’ (in the term ‘social sciences’), and which, in line with Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, view the realm of the social as a matter of everyday artful affair. People are actors who are creatively expressive, and this bears aesthetic dimensions on everyday interactions and performances.” [Chaim Noy, “An aikidōka’s contribution to the teaching of qualitative inquiry.” Qualitative Research. Volume 15, number 1, February 2015. Pages 4-21.]

“I will start by exploring the symbol of the rainbow. Many cultures around the world—and throughout history—have been fascinated by the rainbow, and I would like to examine three characteristics of the rainbow that I find particularly interesting: (1) multiplicity; (2) diaspora; and (3) hybridity. Second, I will argue that the rainbow—and its associated characteristics of multiplicity, diaspora, and hybridity—is a particularly helpful way of understanding the experiences of queer Asian people of faith. As such, I am claiming my identity tonight as a rainbow theologian. Third, I will sketch out what a rainbow, or queer Asian, theology might look like in light of the themes of multiplicity, diaspora, and hybridity.…

“… I have come to realize that there is a huge pastoral need to address the spiritual, emotional, and even physical violence that is experienced by many LGBT [Lesbian–Gay–Bisexual–Transgendered] Asian people of faith around the world.”

[Patrick S. Cheng, “The Rainbow Connection: Bridging Asian American and Queer Theologies.” Theology & Sexuality. Volume 17, issue 3, 2011. Pages 235-264.]

“The metaphor cultural kaleidoscope is used to describe the vibrant, dynamic patterns that characterize the population of the United States in the early years of the 21ˢᵗ century. A kaleidoscope is an optical instrument in which pieces of colored glass are held loosely between plates of glass and mirrors at the end of a tube …. The name kaleidoscope, based on the Greek word kalos [Greek/Hellēniká, καλός, kalós] meaning beautiful, was given by its inventor, Sir David Brewster, to connote the possibility of viewing beautiful forms within the instrument. Although diversity in the United States has been described variously as a ‘melting pot’ (groups assimilate into mainstream culture by giving up their distinctive customs) or ‘salad bowl’ (where groups mix together in a commonly shared environment but retain their identity), kaleidoscope is an appropriate metaphor for current reality.” [Sharon Y. Nickols, Penny A. Ralston, Carol Anderson, Lorna Browne, Genevieve Schroeder, Sabrina Thomas, and Peggy Wild, “The Family and Consumer Sciences Body of Knowledge and the Cultural Kaleidoscope: Research Opportunities and Challenges.” Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal. Volume 37, number 3, March 2009. Pages 266-283.]

“Critical legal studies is the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective. A left-wing academic trend of considerable breadth in the field of law is in itself worthy of attention, but one which has assumed an organized form and has already made a marked impact loudly demands careful scrutiny….

“The influence of Marxist scholarship in the United States has been very limited. It is significant for an understanding of critical legal theory to note that just as Marxism begins to have some influence on radicalized intellectuals during the 1970s, this occurs precisely at the time when the Marxist tradition itself is going through its most significant internal upheaval of recent times. The period in which critical legal studies comes into existence is one in which its radical political perspective encounters a bewildering variety of internal variation, differentiation and sectarianism within contemporary Marxism. This made the adoption of any single strand of modern Marxist theory unlikely, but more importantly, reduced the general attraction of Marxism as the alternative intellectual paradigm. Secondly, the strand of Marxism which has had the greatest influence within critical legal theory focuses upon the processes of legitimacy and of hegemony. This strand, even in its early formulation by [Antonio] Gramsci, and even more clearly in the case of the Frankfurt School of ‘critical theory,’ was concerned to search for linkages with other intellectual traditions; the most important of these being with European sociology, especially that of Max Weber [MP3 audio file]. The core concerns with legitimation, domination, hegemony and consciousness which underpin the critical legal project raise precisely the exciting and challenging theoretical project of synthesizing different intellectual traditions. The implicit theoretical basis of critical legal theory rests upon the project of theoretical synthesis or syncretism.”

[Alan Hunt, “The Theory of Critical Legal Studies.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Volume 6, number 1, 1986. Pages 1-45.]

“The Article elevates this discourse by examining the disruptive pedagogy business law clinicians engage in when they integrate critical legal theory into their courses.…

“Disruptive technologies introduce a new set of attributes from what the mainstream has historically valued. Thus, disruptive pedagogies will produce different results in law students; lawyers who are deeper thinkers, engage critically with the law, and have a stronger professional identity.

“… To promote higher order thinking and deepen the learning of their students, business law clinicians should employ disruptive pedagogies, such as incorporating critical legal theory into their clinics.”

[Alina S. Ball, “Disruptive Pedagogy: Incorporating Critical theory into Business Law Ethics.” Clinical Law Review. Volume 22, number 1, fall 2015. Pages 1-53.]

“… like [Hannah] Arendt, the educational scholars cited here and in the previous section are often engaged in a project of performative pedagogy through the form of their writing itself. [Magdalene] Lampert, for example, brings her readers into the dilemmas she faces herself, opening the possibility that these readers might respond to these dilemmas differently than she or her colleague did, and explicitly noting that one’s answer depends upon who one is as a particular person. For her part, [Maxine] Greene models in her writing her own struggles to imagine the world differently, while also bringing in range of metaphorical and artistic works, seeking to nurture her audience’s capacity for imagination instead of attempting to enforce a single interpretation. And [Caroline] Clark, et al., in their original ‘reader’s theater’ article, sought to model for their readers another approach to preserving a multivocal set of perspectives on the world, experimenting with ‘a form [that] allows each of us to tell the story of the many truths of collaboration.’” [Aaron Schutz, “Theory as Performative Pedagogy: Three Masks fo Hannah Arendt.” Educational Theory. Volume 51, number 2, spring 2001. Pages 127-150.]

“… postmodern educational scholars have shown how apparently ‘freeing’ practices of collaboration, dialogue, and critical thinking in classrooms can actually be powerful tools for domination, forming students into predetermined ways of being and thinking. And I agreed that these observations have been important and useful. My problem with postmodernists’ focus on the pastoral, however, was their general failure to acknowledge that only the children of the privileged are likely to encounter many educational settings substantially organized around sophisticated pastoral strategies. Students at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, in contrast, generally experience more obviously oppressive forms of ‘blunt’ discipline, suffering through years of rote pedagogy, individual seat-work, and enforced silence.” [Aaron Schutz, “Theory Illuminates (and Conceals): A Response to the Critique by Samantha Caughlan.” Educational Researcher. Volume 34, number 2, March 2005. Pages 17-19.]

“… an analysis of power plays a central role in youth organizing. Both in youth organizing and in traditional PA, members often begin by asking questions about who has power/resources in the community, how those with power can be challenged, how power can be taken from the powerful, and what power youths already have ….” [Darwyn Fehrman and Aaron Schutz, “Beyond the Catch-22 of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward a More Pragmatic Approach for Dealing with Power.” Democrary & Education. Volume 19, number 1, spring 2011. Pages 1-9.]

“This essay, in the form of a manifesto, invites symbolic interactionists to think through the practical, progressive politics of a performative cultural studies; an emancipatory discourse connecting critical pedagogy with new ways of writing and performing culture …. I believe performance-based human disciplines can contribute to radical social change, to economic justice, to a cultural politics that extends critical race theory and ‘the principles of a radical democracy to all aspects of society’ … and to change that ‘envisions a democracy founded in a social justice that is “not yet”’ …. I believe that symbolic interactionists should be part of this project ….” [Norman K. Denzin, “The Call to Performance.” Symbolic Interaction. Volume 26, number 1, 2003. Pages 187-207.]

“… Critical Theory set out to do two things. Firstly, to show the internal relationship between knowledge and experience. Facts are socially constructed both in how we perceive them and in their own right, that is, to the extent that social facts are not natural accidents but products of human activity. The second and much more complicated task that Critical Theory set for itself was to use the interconnectedness of knowledge and experience to break out of the given and project normative goals and ends. Thus Critical Theory is envisioned as political in the sense of embracing the unavoidably political nature of all theory and attempting to direct it towards rationally chosen ends. It is this second task that appears to be stymied by Critical Theory’s own analysis of the contradictions of modernity.” [Simone Chambers, “The politics of Critical Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. Fred Rush, editor. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pages 219-247.]

“In care theory, relation is ontologically basic …. Human beings are born from and into relation; it is our original condition. This basic feature of care ethics is important for global ethics because it starts with neither the collective nor the individual. In rejecting those starting places, care ethics shares the relational perspective of Martin Buber …. If we start with the collective, we may derive a powerful communitarian ethic …, and this can give us essential guidance in the traditional tasks of moral education, but it can also blind us to problems within our own communities and make it more difficult to appreciate the views of outsiders.” [Nel Noddings, “Moral Education in an Age of Globalization.” Educational Philosophy and Theory. Volume 42, number 4, June 2010. Pages 390-396.]

“When caring is used to describe a particular sort of relation, both carer and cared-for make significant contributions to the relation. The carer attends – listens to the expressed needs of the cared-for – and responds in a way that either satisfies the need or explains satisfactorily why the need cannot be met. In the latter case, a continuing effort is made to maintain a caring relation even though the immediate need cannot (or, perhaps, should not) be satisfied. The cared-for, in turn, contributes by recognizing the effort; he or she feels cared for and reveals this recognition in some form of response. Then, and only then, does a caring relationship exist.” [Nel Noddings, “Care and Coercion in School Reform.” Journal of Educational Change. Volume 2, number 1, February 2001. Pages 35-43.]

“I do not mean to suggest that the establishment of caring relations will accomplish everything that must be done in education, but these relations provide the foundation for successful pedagogical activity. First, as we listen to our students, we gain their trust and, in an on-going relation of care and trust, it is more likely that students will accept what we try to teach. They will not see our efforts as ‘interference’ but, rather, as cooperative work proceeding from the integrity of the relation. Second, as we engage our students in dialogue, we learn about their needs, working habits, interests, and talents. We gain important ideas from them about how to build our lessons and plan for their individual progress. Finally, as we acquire knowledge about our students’ needs and realize how much more than the standard curriculum is needed, we are inspired to increase our own competence ….” [Nel Noddings, “Caring in education.” Infed. 2005. Online publication. No pagination.]

“‘Care’ theory has become a staple of educational scholarship over the last decade …. Yet, ‘care’ can, at times, become a relatively vague place-holder for those who wish to promote a more nurturing approach to schooling. Therefore, this essay focuses in on the work of perhaps the field’s richest, and most complex thinker: Nel Noddings.” [Aaron Schutz, “Caring in Schools is not Enough: Community, Narrative, and the Limits of Alternity.” Educational Theory. Volume 48, number 3, summer 1998. Pages 373-393.]

“Both [Karl] Marx and [Martin] Heidegger formulate theories of technological Being, expressed in the related conceptions of abstract value and calculable stock. For each of the thinkers, the theory of technological society is elaborated within an historical meta-ontology, which attempts to comprehend the contemporary form of Being as having developed out of Western civilization and to criticize it as limited, contradictory and self-concealing. But, whereas man, beings and Being-itself are treated by Heidegger as if they were monads with windows to each other but no developed relations, Marx grasps them precisely by their mediations. Heidegger, claiming to inquire after the conditions of the possibility of their having relations to each other, hypostatizes even Being – which is no being, but a moment in the mediation of beings – into an in-itself with essential characteristics, possibilities and temporality. Marx, in contrast, understands people and their products as determining the totality of interrelations, which in turn determines them, a totality which is most appropriately conceptualized by a theory of the mode of production as the primary sphere of mediation. The term ‘Being’ is unnecessary to Marx’s theory for it is implicitly dealt with, rather than being fixated upon and glorified.” [Gerry Stahl. Marx & Heidegger. Raleigh, North Carolina: Lulu Publishing. 2016 (from 1975). Page 208.]

“It is not the function of the historian to assess the validity of … [the] often wholesale revisions of what had hitherto been considered as essential to their theory by most schools and tendencies of Marxism, though he can confidently affirm that many of their reconsiderations would have enraged the notoriously short-tempered [Karl] Marx himself. What can be said from a, as it were, neutral position is that such challenges to Marx’s own expressed views (not to mention those of Engels and subsequent ‘classics’) represented the most profound break so far recorded in the continuity of the Marxist intellectual tradition. At the same time, misguided or not, they represented an extraordinary effort to strengthen Marxism by renovating it, and to develop Marxist thinking further, and as such they are evidence for the remarkable vigour and attraction of Marx. For they indicated two things: the recognition of the need for a drastic aggiornamento of Marxism, which did not stop short of investigating the possible errors and inconsistencies in the founder’s own thinking, and at the same time the conviction that the thought of Marx himself, taken as a whole, provides an essential guide to understanding and changing the world.” [Eric Hobsbawm. How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2011. Page 376.]

“One may hazard the guess that most natural scientists and technologists active in socialist states in 1983 would also take the view that Marxism was irrelevant to their professional activities, though they might be reluctant to express it in public, and although they, like all serious scientists, would necessarily have views about the relation between the natural sciences and the present and future of society.

“This state of affairs represents a distinct narrowing of the scope of Marxism, one of whose most powerful appeals to past generations has been precisely that it seemed to constitute a comprehensive, all-embracing and illuminating view of the world, of which human society and its development form only one part. Is it likely to continue? It is impossible to tell. One might merely note some signs of a reaction against the complete extrusion of the non-human cosmos from Marxism. One might also note that the philosophical fashions for denying the objective existence or accessibility of the world on the grounds that all ιfacts’ exist only by virtue of the prior structuring of concepts in the human mind have lost some of their popularity. (It is indeed difficult to combine with praxis, whether that of scientists or those who wish to change the world by political action.)”

[Eric Hobsbawm. How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2011. Pages 381-382.]

“With How to Change the World, Eric Hobsbawm marks over sixty years in books since editing Labour’s Turning Point in 1948 and making his authorial debut proper, with The Jazz Scene and Primitive Rebels, in 1959. Should it prove to be the last of his twenty-five or so titles to date, it would represent a fitting farewell to a career intimately bound up with the name, and intellectual and political legacy, of Karl Marx.…

“With the dishonours of communism and market fundamentalism rendered approximately even, Marx has been liberated from the incubus of ‘Marxism-Leninism.’ The questions he posed, rather than the answers his successors gave, are back on humanity’s agenda.”

[Gregory Elliott, “The Old Mole’s Path.” New Left Review. Issue II, number 67, January–February 2011. Pages 137-153.]

“Two reasons for electronic music’s experimental quality can be given in terms of its social context. Recent composers reject the props to listening exploited by commercial music, arrangements of romantic music, movie sound tracks, television backgrounds, and advertising jingles. They are thereby forced to search for new approaches less manipulative of their material and their audience. Techniques suggested by the electronic instruments are tried out, judged by the ear, varied, explored. Encouragement of the unanticipated becomes the paradoxical goal. The listener, too, must remain open to the unknown, struggle with a work’s meaning, and draw conclusions.

“Secondly, the use of generalized technical equipment for synthesizing sound structures creates its own world of possibilities, circumscribed by the use of one or more loudspeakers. This largely unexplored realm calls for new emphases and for divergences from practices appropriate to instrumental music. Traditional instruments were developed with the triadic chord in mind and expressive interpretation as a primary goal. Now, with synthesis by means of scientifically standardized circuits, the elements into which the technician can analyze all acoustic phenomena assume a major role.

“Theory of sound emerges in the practice of electronic music with thematic prominence. Because everything must be built up from scratch from abstract temporal orderings, that is certain effects unrealizable with an orchestra can be achieved more easily than can simple harmonies. Previously unimaginable sonorities and the whole range of temporal intervals are readily available. Through careful splicing of tape or with the aid of electronic control, the most intricate rhythms can be produced.”

[Gerry Stahl. Essays in Social Philosophy. Raleigh, North Carolina: Lulu Publishing. 2016. Pages 71-72.]

“What is critically reflexive practice and why is it important to management education? … In practical terms, this means examining critically the assumptions underlying our actions, the impact of those actions, and from a broader perspective, what passes as good management practice. The concept of reflexivity has been debated across a variety of disciplines including sociology, the natural sciences, and psychology … and more recently in organization and management studies …. However, it is often difficult to translate the conceptual and theoretical aspects into practical implications for managing. In this article, I suggest that the practice of critical reflexivity is of particular importance to management education because by thinking more critically about our own assumptions and actions, we can develop more collaborative, responsive, and ethical ways of managing organizations.” [Ann L. Cunliffe, “Republication of ‘On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner.’” Journal of Management Education. Volume 40, issue 3, December 2016. Pages 747-786. Originally published as: Ann L. Cunliffe, “On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner.” Journal of Management Education. Volume 28, issue 4, August 2004. Pages 407-426.]

“Without forming any critical theory of the institutions and codes which are forming character, without even considering whether they are what they should be, the individual yet comes at least to a practical recognition that it is in these institutions that he gets his satisfactions, and through these codes that he is protected. He identifies himself, his own life, with the social forms and ideals in which he lives, and repels any attack upon them as he would an attack upon himself. The demands which the existing institutions make upon him are not felt as the coercions of a despot, but as expressions of his own will, and requiring loyalty as such. The conventional conscience, if it does not grow into this, tends to become slavish, while an intelligence which practically realizes, although with out continual reflection, the significance of conventional morality is free in its convictions and service.” [John Dewey. Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Inland Press imprint of Register Publishing Company. 1891. Pages 185-186.]

“The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.

“Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation. They can be funny, perturbing, or traumatic. Rooted not in fixed conditions of possibility but in the actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind and sets in motion, they can be seen as both the pressure points of events or banalities suffered and the trajectories that forces might take if they were to go unchecked. Akin to Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, they are ‘social experiences in solution’; they ‘do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures.’”

[Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2007. Pages 1-3.]

“In this article I would like to raise some questions that unsettle the seemingly disparate identities that justify this turn – the critical, structural forms of attention assigned to the critic on one side and the affective, dynamic attentions that animate everyday life on the other. For example, are the suspicious, wary sentiments of the style of critique under question so disconnected from the atmosphere and actions of our current civic sphere? And do the times and spaces we are living in truly demand methods that are less critical, wary, and discerning? As a way into these questions, this article will address an intriguing, internal conflict within a text that has been widely commended for its response to calls for methodological change, Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects …. Though it is marked as a departure from ‘paranoid reading’, I argue that Stewart’s work gives us reason to reconsider the potential, character, and social utility of suspicious attention, and thus the division of critical and social methods. By highlighting this counter-narrative within Stewart’s work, my discussion also addresses broader questions about the nature of affect and the value of critical reading that have arisen in recent and prominent debates about methodology.” [Ashley Barnwell, “Creative paranoia: Affect and social method.” Emotion, Space and Society. Volume 20, August 2016. Pages 10-17.]

“In … [one] kind of the working-class novel … feelings extend outwards, from kindness to loyalty to mates to loyalty to the union to loyalty to socialism, without too many barriers being set up, because it’s much the same feeling being and defining yourself collectively as this kind of industrial and political person. Among the ragged-arsed inhabitants of that deliberately named Mugsborough the structure of feeling is very different, and there is a bitterness which could only have been let out in any tolerable way by a man who was also earning directly as a working man.” [Raymond Williams, “The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture, 1982.” History Workshop. Number 16, autumn 1983. Pages 74-82.]

“… [There are] new structures of feeling such as the modern experience of mobility ….” [Raymond Williams, “Film and the Cultural Tradition.” Cinema Journal. Volume 52, number 3, spring 2013. Pages 19-24.]

“Avant-garde and experimental writings have been associated with a wide range of political perspectives and agendas, including emancipatory struggles for social justice, ‘progressive’ ideologies, militant actions, repressive regimes, and allegedly apolitical forms of creative expression. This special issue focuses on a radical strand of experimental world literature, one that participates critically and creatively in the ongoing struggle for affirmative social transformation in a globalizing world. This kind of radical literary experiment is indebted, at least in part, to the revolutionary ideas and practices of the nineteenth-century avant-garde, which inaugurated and inspired ‘a range of social postures and strategies for artists by which they could differentiate themselves from current social and cultural structures while also intervening in them’ …. This spirit of avant-gardism continued to stimulate the emancipatory agendas and fictions of the twentieth century, including its anti-colonial, democratic, feminist/queer, and ecological movements. Such experiments have contributed to a radical imagination, understood as an ongoing and collective effort ‘to think critically, reflexively and innovatively about the social world’ …. However, in our contemporary era of neoliberal capitalism and still-incomplete decolonization, we suggest that radical experimental writing now faces distinctive creative challenges as it seeks to surpass the known limits of globalization’s own world-making experiments and to inaugurate new forms of collective knowledge and coexistence.” [Wendy Knepper and Sharae Deckard, “Towards a Radical World Literature: Experimental Writing in a Globalizing World.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature. Volume 47, number 1–2, January–April 2016. Pages 1-25.]

“An ontology of totality-exteriority underpins … the ‘point zero’ perspective of Eurocentric philosophies. The space of presence and absence that defines the boundary between totality-exteriority in this account of the human condition may be regarded as a socio-historic actual, susceptible to the dictates of the material forces of the world of the ‘said,’ yet never quite subsumed by the futurity of ‘the sayings,’ of becoming, of the ‘real.’ In this understanding of totality-exteriority, therefore, the responsibility for the suffering Other entails the correction of the ‘actual,’ by the embrace of ‘prepolitical proximity that is sought to inform the ‘political’ as (Levinasian) ‘first philosophy.’ Put simply, responsible politics, in this view, involves the repair of the distance between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘actual,’ the inclusion of the excluded Other into totality, from exteriority, from absence into presence, from Non-Being into Being.” [Jayan Nayar, “The Politics of Hope and the Other-in-the-World: Thinking Exteriority.” Law and Critique. Volume 24, number 1, February 2013. Pages 63-85.]

“While once colonialism was blatant in its dehumanizing of social relationships, notwithstanding the claims of the ‘civilizing mission,’ now that same dehumanization takes place under the acceptable, if not desirable, guise of globalized development. The ‘poor’ has come to replace the ‘savage/native;’ the ‘expert consultant,‘ the ‘missionary;’ ‘training seminars,’ mass ‘baptizing;’ the handphone in the pocket, the cross on the altar. But some things—the foreigner’s degree, attire, consumer items, etc.—don’t change. And what of the ‘comprador elites,’ that band of minority mercenaries who symbolized to the colonialist all that was good about what it meant to be the servile ‘civilized,‘ who served as the faithful mouthpieces of the master? Today, many go by the names of ‘government functionaries’ and ‘entrepreneurs.’ Regenerated by these contemporary ideological weapons of the desired human condition, the processes of ordering, of creating orders of inhumanity, carry on with violence intact.” [Jayan Nayar, “Orders of Inhumanity.” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems. Volume 9, fall 1999. Pages 599-631.]

“This reclaiming of the voice of judgement represents a significant challenge to the power of corporations and governments to define the economic good of society. I believe this heralds a new politics of law. The challenge is to recognize these expressions of people’s judgements as law, truly of the people, by the people, for the people. The time will come when a different law is done – out of conflict and struggle, defeat and suppression, no doubt. But the time will come.” [Jayan Nayar, “Doing Law Differently: How do we police transnational corporations if the legal processes are manipulated by them?” New Internationalist. Number 330, December 2000. Pages 20-21.]

“We observe that at the root of the crisis of sovereignty, and of the sovereign subject, is a perceived betrayal, an abandonment even, of ‘man,’ as ‘subject,’ as the ontological originary figure of Eurocentric Enlightenment mythology. Central to this crisis of the ‘subject’ is the realization that the state, as the bounded expression of sovereign will, appears to be neither the protective, emancipative receptacle vehicle for Man’s historical march toward the future, nor the supreme actor in defining the actualities of global sociopolitical and legal relations. The long-held assumption of sovereignty, therefore, as the original point of reference for the philosopher seeking to locate the site and the boundaries of subjectivity through ‘political belonging’ appears no longer sacrosanct under the present conditions of ruptured state formations and practices within a context of neoliberal, globalized, transterritorialized relations; indeed, not only the states of the Third World but also those of the ‘developed’ First World today appear as little more than ‘cunning’ states where constitutional–legal postulations of citizenship and rights merely serve the purposes of internal legitimization, as the more pressing business of negotiating the opportunities and vicissitudes of global capitalism are undertaken.” [Jayan Nayar, “On the Elusive Subject of Sovereignty.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. Volume 39, number 2, May 2014. Pages 124-147.]

“What [Karl] Marx said of capitalism can also be applied to imperialism: monopoly creates competition and competition monopoly. The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and multi-millionaires obliged the great financial groups, who were obsorbing the small ones, to think up the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.

“Hence from the purely economic standpoint it is not impossible that capitalism may still live through another phase, the translation of cartellization into foreign policy: a phase of ultra-imperialism, which of course we must struggle against as energetically as we do against imperialism, but whose perils lie in another direction, not in that of the arms race and the threat to world peace.”

[Karl Kautsky, “Ultra-Imperialism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 59, January–February 1970. Pages 41-46.]

“Imperialism … is the single hope, the single idea of the future which offers anything to present society. Consequently this delusion will increase until the proletariat gains the power to determine the policy of the nation, to overthrow the policy of imperialism and substitute the policy of Socialism. The longer this competitive armament continues, the heavier the load that will be laid upon the people of each country. Consequently each class will seek more and more to shove these loads off upon other classes, and therefore the more this competitive Armament will tend to sharpen class antagonism.” [Karl Kautsky. The Road to Power. A. W. Simons, authorized translator. Chicago, Illinois: Progressive Woman Publishing Co. 1909. Pages 108-109.]

“… the English workers find it difficult to widen their struggle against the industrial entrepreneur into a struggle against the whole capitalist system of exploitation. They turn against particular manifestations of it, such as the sweatshops or unemployment, without asking themselves how these are connected to the totality of capitalist society, and without opposing this society in all its manifestations, without attacking all its fortified positions. During the Boer War, chauvinism found almost no energetic opposition in the country. Even some socialists paid tribute to imperialism on that occasion. The lamentations of India fall on deaf ears among them. The new Labour Party wants to remain independent from both Liberals and Conservatives, but refuses to adopt a definite programme, out of fear that it might be a socialist one. And even Keir Hardie felt compelled to criticise the idea of class struggle some years ago.” [Karl Kautsky, “The American Worker.” Daniel Gaido, translator. Historical Materialism. Volume 11, number 4, 2003. Pages 15-77.]

“William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) was three times presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. During these presidential campaigns he sponsored a series of reforms such as ‘free silver’ (bimetallism) as against the gold standard in 1896, anti-imperialism in 1900 (though he supported the Treaty of Paris by which the United States bought from Spain its former colonial possessions of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines), and anti-trust policies in 1908. After Woodrow Wilson’s victory in 1912 Bryan became Secretary of State. In that role, he supported American military intervention in the civil war in Mexico in 1914. A year later, he resigned to protest against what he regarded as Wilson’s pro-war policies, but in 1916 he campaigned energetically for Wilson’s re-election. A fundamentalist Christian, Bryan was a strong supporter of Prohibition in the 1920s, as well as an outspoken critic of the theory of evolution during the Scopes Trial in 1925.” [Karl Kautsky, “Samuel Gompers.” Historical Materialism. Volume 16, number 3, 2008. Pages 137-146.]

“The terms in which [Karl] Kautsky’s Marxist orthodoxy has been diagnosed were set by [Vladimir] Lenin: the specific errors of which Kautsky was convicted (the state, imperialism, etc.) were said to be sustained by an undialectical treatment of Marxism as dogma rather than as a guide to action …. The crucial issue is the relation of theory and practice. Although Lenin’s assessment is more nuanced than is commonly supposed, this issue has usually been addressed by his partisans in terms of the theoretically uninteresting contention that Kautsky was guilty of a kind of akrasia [Greek/Hellēniká, ἀκρασία, a̓krasía, lacking good judgment or, literally, lacking command], of weakness of the revolutionary will. Western Marxist theorists, on the other hand, found a separation of theory and practice in the philosophical underpinnings of Second International Marxism, a separation that could be overcome by the reassertion of a ‘critical Marxist’ philosophical perspective that envisions the unity of theory and practice.” [Alan Shandro, “Karl Kautsky: On the Relation of Theory and Practice.” Science & Society. Volume 61, number 4, winter 1997/1998. Pages 474-501.]

“… Social Democratic Marxism (SDM), associated with the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands [Social Democratic Party of Germany] (SPD), taken from the utterances of Karl Marx and popularized by Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, ‘and other Marxists of the first generation’ ….” [Jamie Melrose, “Das Aufrechterhaltene Scheinradikale Alibi: The Golden Age of Social Democratic Marxism Reconsidered.” Working USA: The Journal of Labor & Society. Volume 18, number 2, June 2015. Pages 291-305.]

“The crucial question that divides [Vladimir] Lenin and [Karl] Kautsky is whether the imperialist dominance of finance capital is an inevitable feature of late capitalism, or whether the strains and contradictions that develop with nation-state conflict can be overcome and develop into ultra-imperialistic capitalism. This question has often been argued in semantic terms. For instance, Lenin defines imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. By associating this concept with the dominant mode of production, it becomes much more than a policy of domination. Imperialism becomes identified with the expansionist drive that must characterize monopoly capital. Kautsky, on the other hand, explicitly views imperialism as a specific policy.” [John A. Willoughby, “The Lenin-Kautsky Unity-Rivalry Debate.” The Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 11, number 4, winter 1979. Pages 91-101.]

“One may wonder who and what might be transformed. A transformative pedagogy of economic justice aspires to transform both the teacher and learners as colearners in understanding and embracing the economic realities of the poor. It expects to contribute to the transformation of the lives of those who are pushed to the margins as a result of unjust economic practices.… It [this dissertation] has insisted that we value the knowledge of local people and take into consideration their rich experiences. It has stressed the importance of supporting local farming and local businesses if we want economic justice to become a reality. This support not only benefits local farmers and businesses but the ecosystem as well through the reduction of carbon emissions as foods and goods are transported at the local level.

“For a pedagogy of economic justice to be transformative, the theory and guiding principles articulated in the closing chapter of this dissertation must be embodied within a specific congregation to facilitate learning that is particular rather than generic. To Moore, learners are contextually reflective beings whose unique realities shape what they know, how they know, and how they choose to act. Thus, the specificity of a congregation’s context necessarily shapes the particular focus of its study and the development of activism that is relevant to its location.”

[Narola Ao McFayden. Economic Justice: Towards a Transformative Pedagogy. Ph.D. dissertation. Union Presbyterian Seminary. Richmond, Virginia. November, 2011. Page 140.]

“The construct of embodiment denotes specific assumptions regarding body and mind, as well as body and culture.…

“The research program on the Experience of Embodiment construct adds to the psychological literature by providing a new lens through which to examine ways in which girls and women inhabit their bodies from positive experiences of embodied agency and attuned self-care to negative experiences of restricted agency and self neglect or harm. The emergence of dimensions of experience that capture both positive and disruptive ways of inhabiting the body, allows the tracing of shifts in embodiment throughout girls’ and women’s life journeys.”

[Niva Piran, “Embodied possibilities and disruptions: The emergence of the Experience of Embodiment construct from qualitative studies with girls and women.” Body Image. Volume 18, September 2016. Pages 43-60.]

“Until recently, the default assumption of many scientists was that most natural phenomena are distributed according to the bell curve or normal distribution. However, PLs [power laws] are now being discovered in such a great number and variety of phenomena that some scientists are calling them ‘more normal than “normal.”’ …

“… Managers need to learn enough about PLs to avoid both the potential incoherences of the chaotic regime as well as the tempting oversimplifications that so often plague the ordered regime ….

“In a world that is becoming ever more connected and complex, however, management inquiry is yet to take up the PL challenge. It lacks an adequate conceptualization of extreme outcomes and so, unsurprisingly, is unable to incorporate them into its current theorizing. We have therefore drawn from the complexity sciences to introduce a more penetrating treatment of PLs, extreme outcomes, and scale-free theory into management inquiry. We believe that PL thinking will ultimately connect the concept of organization used in the social sciences with those used in the kindred fields of biology and ecology ….”

[Max Boisot and Bill McKelvey, “Connectivity, Extremes, and Adaptation: A Power-Law Perspective of Organizational Effectiveness.” Journal of Management Inquiry. Volume 20, number 2, June 2011. Pages 119-133.]

“… we argue here that moral decision making in clinical situations should look beyond established normative ethical frameworks or principles derived from them, towards an approach framed here as Proportionism. The Proportionist approach seeks the highest good based upon a balance between a priori rules and empirical ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ utilitarian calculations, with, as its starting point, the actual reality of the patient and their situation.…

“We argue … that clinicians need to move away from an over-dependence on substantive frameworks or principles derived from them, towards a procedural framework, framed here as Proportionism. In a Proportionist approach, the clinical decision making is set in the context of this particular patient, in her actual situation. The empirical, greatest Good, utilitarian option is balanced by a proportional awareness of fundamental a priori rules. A rules-based decision is balanced by an appropriate proportion of empirical utility situation awareness. A Proportionist approach allows for tolerance of anomalous positions in an ethical dilemma where interpretations offered by both the deontological and the teleological frameworks are valid, but both need to be moderated and made complete by an empathic, compassionate, caring, self-insightful, and virtuous clinician in communicative discourse with the participants in the dilemma. Thus, together, in the language of the virtue ethical framework, they achieve practical wisdom in order to impel practical action which results in the flourishing of all in the discourse.”

[Paul Walker and Terence Lovat, “Towards a Proportionist Approach to Moral Decision Making in Medicine.” Ethics & Medicine. Volume 32, number 3, fall 2016. Pages 153-161.]

“This paper outlines a typology of visual analytical prisms based on social critical theories. Four compositional art analysis paradigms are presented. These include (a) two descriptive analytical prism-compositional analyses of spatial division for resources in the system, (b) compositional analyses of the reciprocal relationship between figure and background, or micro and macro levels of experience, and two transformative analytical prisms, (c) using compositional mechanisms as a way to self-define content for marginalized and silenced groups, and (d) using visual language to shift static social stands and negotiate multiple perspectives.…

“… so many art therapy clients are sent to art therapy because of cultural difficulties with language, and as such, are living in high context social realities with systemic problems. From this, it would seem worthwhile to attempt to create a more rigorous compositional analysis of art based in social theories. The aim of this paper is to create a model for analyzing the visual compositional mechanisms of art through a social analytical prism.”

[Ephrat Huss, “Toward a social critical, analytical prism in art therapy: The example of marginalized Bedouin women’s images.” The Arts in Psychotherapy. Volume 50, September 2016. Pages 84-90.]